Intelligent Enterprise

Mark Smith's Friday blog post was just the latest in a chorus of calls for IBM to drop the above-it-all attitude and jump into the business intelligence market. Well, the company has finally responded, announcing this morning that it will acquire Cognos for $5 billion in cash.

What gets me about IBM is that it is such a cool cucumber. Here it is, the last to act with few good choices left, yet it manages to come up with a winner, painting it as a carefully considered deal it came up with after scouring a vast array of choices.

"We chose Cognos because of its industry-leading technology that is based on open standards, which complements IBM's Service Oriented Architecture strategy," intoned IBM's Steve Mills in a company press release. He also asserted that "IBM has been providing Business Intelligence solutions for decades," which is also annoyingly true, though not in industry's strictest definition of the term "BI."

It was just last year that I interviews Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM's Information Management software division, and he said IBM had no intention of getting into BI. "We are not in what we call the query analysis, reporting and analytics business," he said. "Infrastructure needs to feed into BI systems, and there are multiple vendors in the market with many billions of dollars worth of revenue."

Well, times do change. Between the Hyperion and Business Objects deals and Microsoft's bolder market entry, billions of dollars of the BI revenue Goyal spoke of is now controlled by rivals. IBM had to act, just as it finally had to respond (late) to all the consolidation in the enterprise content management market. It came up with a winner on that occassion, too, acquiring FileNet, the largest and most like-minded company remaining. IBM announced the FileNet deal only days after an analyst declared EMC to be the new leader in content management. Then boom, Big Blue acquires one of the industry's largest vendors and puts distance between itself and the competition.

Maybe its just a good act, but you get the sense that IBM has these deals wired well in advance, ready to pull out of the corporate back pocket just when analysts are ready to declare the company to be on the sidelines of the industry. Is it some Ivy League insider thing? Perhaps Deep Blue, that famed IBM super computer, is calculating these moves years in advance, like it's some giant IT industry chess match? It's just scary if you ask me.