Briefs

Sep 6, 2007. SearchDataManagement.com

Cognos Inc. today responded to acquisitions and a push by its corporate performance management (CPM) competitors into the finance office by making a purchase of its own.

Ottawa-based Cognos agreed today to purchase Westborough, Mass.-based Applix Inc. for approximately $339 million. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Applix's analytics technology capability will join Cognos's product portfolio, including: Cognos 8 Planning, Cognos 8 Controller, and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. A key feature of the addition of Applix is the company's TM1 product, a 64-bit, in-memory multidimensional OLAP server.

"The TM1 store is a centralized, high-performance, read-write store," Cognos CEO Rob Ashe said in a morning conference call. "But if you peel back the layers of the onion and look at what we're both good at, Applix is good at centralized, highly analytic, rapid-update, scenario-based planning. What we're really good at is distributed planning with an architecture built for thousands of users in remote locations who look at their own models to create a centralized plan for high-frequency planning. Combined with our specialized go-to-market model, I think we'll be very highly competitive in the market."

Ashe added that integration of the two companies' products would be "modest," thanks to some overlap between Applix's 3,000 customers and Cognos's 3,500.

The office of the CFO has emerged as a battleground for vendors selling BI and CPM, technologies that are rapidly coming together. Earlier this year, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp. acquired CPM specialist Hyperion; Walldorf, Germany-based SAP AG responded by acquiring OutlookSoft; and Paris and San Jose, Calif.-based Business Objects then bought Cartesis.

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