IBM/Cognos - What's Left?

Not surprisingly, IBM announced plans to acquire Cognos today. Our immediate reactions:

• Although everyone is denying it, certainly feels responsive and "me too" to SAP/BOBJ and ORCL/HYSL.
• At $5B, it's the largest software acquisition by IBM, and in fact greater than IBM spent in 2006 on all 16 software acquisitions it did.
• IBM has been in the BI space for a long time, it'll be interesting to see if they can extend this into a broader Performance Management play, of which they have been late to the game. Also, watch what they do with SaaS and BI.
• While the big get bigger, we continue to see tremendous innovation around the BI stack, particularly with open source, i.e. Paris based Talend.
• MicroStrategy anyone?

Thoughts?

Author: Mark Zawacki