It also got a new round of funding, including an investment from Greylock Partners, that brings its total capital raised so far to $11 million. Also joining Tidemark’s board are Peter Currie, president of Currie Capital; and Phil Wilmington, former co-president of PeopleSoft and the CEO of OutlookSoft. Both have joined Tidemark’s board of directors. Also on the board are Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO at Workday and a Greylock Partner; and Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Tidemark is building what it calls an Enterprise Performance Management application — all in the cloud — but it is also built from the ground up with mobile applications in mind. I had lunch with CEO Christian Gheorghe last week, and I have to say that what he described to me sounded, at first, a lot like what I’ve heard from lots of other companies wanting to give business leaders useful, up-to-the-minute business information they can act on.

Too often in business intelligence and analytics, projects fail to deliver, Gheorghe says, because they’re good at showing data but lousy in leading to action. “They give you a lot of information, but the next step is what to do about it,” he says. “What are the courses of action I can take, how do I react to what’s happening?”

And maybe this sounds familiar: Data from one application that you’d like to use is tricky to move over into another. “We call it the alt-tab syndrome,” Gheorghe says. “You have to alt-tab between applications, some of which were built before the Internet, back in the client-server era.”

Lots of the existing business intelligence tools are old, not designed to be mobile or to handle volatility in the markets, and they don’t deal well with unstructured data, which everyone seems to want to get a handle on these days.

Gheorghe spent five years and change at SAP, including a stint as its CTO, by way of its acquisition of OutlookSoft. He then spent about nine months as Greylock’s Entrepreneur in Residence. During that time, he realized a perfect storm was happening: If you had to build the business of analytics from scratch, it would solve the problem of making you both cloud-ready and mobile, but also ready to handle mountains of big data. “We found a lot of pain in the core analytic processes that companies had spent a lot of money trying to solve,” he says. Pain like that creates an opportunity for the one who can make it go away.

Tidemark aims to deliver real-time metrics information that has been adjusted for risk and which takes into account all the various strategic, financial and operational forecasting a business does. “There are so many things that the consumer-side companies have done with big data like Facebook and Zynga, but nothing like that has happened in the enterprise,” he says. “Basically they’re still using things that are drilling down and across in grids that no one uses, and dashboards that are two weeks behind.”

Tidemark is launching three applications: Metrics Management and Management Reporting, which aims to answer not the “what’s happening?” question about a business but “why is it happening?”; Enterprise Planning, the classic budgeting, forecasting and analysis functions; and Profitability Monitoring by product, customer and channel — essentially where you’re making and losing money.

The company has also teamed up with three partners: SnapLogic has hooked up with Tidemark to integrate data in the cloud. And since you can’t seem to do anything in big data these days without using some version of Hadoop, the open source big data platform, Tidemark says it has signed up with Cloudera, which sells its own tricked-out version of Hadoop; and VMware, whose vCloud will run Tidemark’s cloud.

Gheorghe’s backstory is interesting. He escaped communist Romania in the late 1980s, but what moved him to leave wasn’t entirely political. He was involved in the trade of bootleg cassette tapes and heard Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” As a product of the evil West, it was forbidden under the regime of Nicolai Ceaușescu. Gheorghe decided there was no way that a country that produced such music could be all that bad. So off he went.

It was of course more complicated than that, but the anecdote serves as a pretty good metaphor for what Gheorge is trying to do with Tidemark, Horowitz says. Yes, there are an awful lot of companies that seek to use the cloud to provide business intelligence. “There’s a lot of new things out there, including Salesforce.com, Successfactors, any of them, they’re new but they bring a lot of the old software paradigms with them,” he says. “None of them have been a complete re-think. But Christian has really done it. It’s ironic that he was the one who could get his mind out of the old paradigm, having been in it for the last 15 years.”

It’s a sound idea, and lots of companies large and small have made various interesting plays around it. The biggest is probably IBM, which loves to tell and re-tell its many data analytics success stories. There’s also been a lot of start-up activity around it with companies like GoodData and Domo getting lots of funding.

Many companies are turning to Hadoop, the open source version of Google’s MapReduce technology, which takes large sets of data and makes them manageable. Facebook, Groupon and AOL are three high-profile examples. And there’s such an opportunity seen around Hadoop that the number of companies offering their own distribution of it are multiplying.

Data’s great to have, but its hard to do anything with it if you can’t understand what it’s telling you. That’s where Platfora, a start-up launched by Ben Werther, a former Greenplum exec, aims to come into the picture.

Until today, Platfora has been operating in stealth mode, but it announced that it had landed a $5.7 million A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is also joining the round. Scott Weiss, AH’s general partner, is joining Platfora’s board. Weiss blogged about the deal on Ben Horowitz’s blog today.

The point of Platfora is to take the big batches of data that live in Hadoop and turn them into beautiful graphical representations that are easy to interpret and understand. I talked with Werther yesterday. “The last generation of business intelligence products served a good purpose, but as the amount of data has grown, the traditional systems have been struggling to keep up,” he told me. That’s why they’ve been turning to Hadoop. But Hadoop is only half of the solution. “Hadoop really only gives you the plumbing,” he says.

Platfora is intended to work with existing clusters of machines running Hadoop, including Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon EMR. Questions and queries posed to the data get transformed into visually clear dashboards and insights.

Weiss, writing on Horowitz’s blog, said that Hadoop needs a business intelligence platform that will make it user-friendly to people other than software developers, and that the established players aren’t up to the task. “The legacy BI vendors don’t have the product architecture for Hadoop or Big Data and we believe this opens the door for a new franchise to be built,” he wrote.

The company doesn’t have a product yet. That will come early next year, Werther says.

GoodData, a cloud-based player in the business intelligence space, says it has closed a $15 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. John O’Farrell, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner, will join GoodData’s board. Also joining the board: Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division; Google is not investing.

GoodData says it will use the funds to accelerate its business, and it seems to be doing a fine job of that already. It has 2,500 customers, among them Time Warner Cable, Capgemini and Pandora Media. And many Cloud service providers — including Zendesk, Twilio, Pardot and Get Satisfaction — offer analytics apps that are built on GoodData’s platform.

Business intelligence is a busy space. Take, for instance, the case of Domo, the company formerly known as Corda Technologies, which was bought out by former Omniture CEO Josh James, who promptly raised a combined $33 million in venture funding.

This would be AH’s second investment in GoodData, the first being a $2.5 million seed stage round announced in 2009. The company announced a $6.5 million A round led by Fidelity Growth Partners last year. By my count, GoodData has raised $26.1 million in funding. The other participating investors are General Catalyst Partners and Windcrest Partners.

This fall several schools, including Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, are unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs; other courses and programs were launched in the previous school year.

International Business Machines Corp., which has invested more than $14 billion buying analytics industry companies such as Coremetrics and Netezza Corp. since 2005, has teamed up with more than 200 schools, including Fordham, to develop analytics curriculum and training.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

InsideView, which today announced $12 million in funding in a series C round led by Foundation Capital, aims to be something of a personal CIA for salespeople. The service deploys within existing CRM applications like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM and SugarCRM to enhance the information view on a person or company with data gathered from numerous sources. When you look at the window for a target, you see information taken from their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, information about them from Jigsaw, but also what people are saying about their company on Twitter. There’s also corporate financial and relationship data from CaptialIQ–a powerful financial database owned by McGraw-Hill–and a news feed from Thomson-Reuters.

Yes, it’s another social enterprise software play says CEO Umberto Milletti, but with one key difference. “Most of the social CRM space has been focused on the marketing and support use cases. We’re very focused on business-to-business sales,” he told me. “It’s using social media together with traditional news and financial information to make salespeople more productive. We turn all that information into business intelligence.”

With the funding round, Foundation’s Paul Holland, a former exec at Kana Communications, is joining the InsideView board. Its prior investors–who are also participating in this round–are Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners.

The company has more than 1,000 corporate customers, including Adobe, BMC, Cap Gemini, Experian and SuccessFactors, and supports some 75,000 end users.

Millietti said the funding will be used to boost distribution. “We want to get every customer-facing sales professional in the world an InsideView acount,” he said.

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.

Last week, BoomTown paid a long overdue visit on Jeff Weiner, the former Yahoo exec who took over the helm of LinkedIn from founder Reid Hoffman just over a year ago.

Among the topics of discussion: The strong growth over the last year of the social networking site focused on business professionals; its latest goal to surface “business intelligence” for users; LinkedIn’s competitors; and, of course, the likely initial public offering in its future.

Running the show has turned out well so far for Weiner, who was a digital exec among many previous jobs.

Before coming to the Mountain View, Calif.-based LinkedIn, Weiner ran the Network division of Yahoo (YHOO), putting him in charge of most of its consumer offerings.

He left the Internet giant in 2008 and did a brief stint as an executive-in-residence at two Silicon Valley venture firms–Accel Partners and Greylock Partners–before joining LinkedIn later that year as its president.

When he took over as CEO in June of 2009, Weiner listed a number of priorities moving forward, including scaling the network, increasing the user base and engagement, improving user experience and product ease, juicing up search, further expanding internationally and strengthening the platform and third-party developer relationships.

That’s a lot, although most simply focus on LinkedIn’s growth from 42 million members worldwide then to more than 70 million today.

While profitable–via three lines of revenue, including premium subscriptions, corporate solutions and advertising–LinkedIn will need that rocket growth to shoulder its $1 billion valuation and perhaps even more if it has its anticipated IPO.

There are challenges, of course, such as the daily appearance of other professional networking sites and apps, but none has yet gained as much traction or offered such rich streams of data yet as LinkedIn.

Here’s Weiner talking about all that and more in the video of this interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-talks-about-growth-business-intelligence-ipo-and-more/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20100226/almost-famous-pat-hanrahan-of-tableau/ http://allthingsd.com/20100226/almost-famous-pat-hanrahan-of-tableau/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:16:20 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=21457 A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We dropped by the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford University for an interview with Pat Hanrahan, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, as well as chief technology officer at Tableau, a business intelligence start-up with Ph.D level chops in data visualization.

Who: Pat Hanrahan

What: Chief Technology Officer

Why: Last Thursday, Tableau launched a public version of the data visualization product it sells to the likes of Microsoft (MSFT), eBay (EBAY) and Google (GOOG). Tableau Public is a free service aimed at journalists, bloggers and academics who want to create original, data-driven graphics similar to those from major news outlets.

Where: tableausoftware.com (Web site); @tableau (Twitter); Seattle and San Francisco (analog places)

Who else: Tableau competes directly with huge enterprise software companies like Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP). Tableau Public, on the other hand, signals its entrance into a new market where the field is wide open.

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Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve had mostly good jobs. I guess the worst was when I worked in a paper mill in college. I’d be on fire duty, which meant standing around with a hose and doing nothing. That said, if you go a week in a paper mill without a fire, you are doing well. All that dust accumulates and practically becomes explosive.

Geek Crush: Francis Crick, the molecular biologist. I got my Ph.D in biophysics, and he was one of the only physicists ever to be successful in biology. He also brought theory to biology at a time when it was unheard of, and I thought that was a really big thing. This was back in the late 1970s when it was basically impossible to be a theoretical biologist. I’m a big fan of the mixing of theory and practice. He kind of brought the two of those together.

Gadget of the Moment: You know, I’m a little bit of a gadget guy, but I’m more of a maker type. I like electronics, mechanics, chemistry–lots of things. My favorite recent project was building a cat wheel. It’s like a hamster wheel, but giant, four feet in diameter. I’ve got a Bengal cat. He’s very energetic.

Secret Fame: Pat has two technical Oscars for his founding work on the RenderMan software at Pixar.

Secret Shame: He can’t sing or dance to save his life.

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Bio in 140 Characters

Pat grew up in Green Bay. Wisconsin made him a Ph.D chess champion. A self-taught programmer, now he’s a CS professor and entrepreneur.

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The Five Questions

You say Tableau is in business intelligence, but what do you really do?

Well, Tableau’s center is really about answering questions with data. A lot of data visualization research is really about making pretty pictures, but we worked with psychologists and graphic designers to understand how people deal with visual data and process it. Let’s say you could answer a question by making a picture that shows the answer. If you want to know what the maximum selling product is, you make a picture where maximum stands out. If you want to know spatial distribution, you make a map. We create pictures that answer questions, but we do it for businesses that want to know things about their own metrics. It has been termed visual analysis–sort of doing a Q&A with data and images.

Who is using it well?

I’ve been really surprised by how many businesses use the sorts of metrics that work well with Tableau. We sell to category managers at eBay, for instance. Google uses us a lot for managing its data centers. We are not really vertical at all. Tableau is useful for anyone who has data.

A really interesting example is our relationship with Xbox. They record all the game play and then offer data through us to their game developers so that the developers can see what the actual game play experience is like. When are people dying? Are players spending time where the developers think they should? Stuff like that.

It is really everything. Some churches use us to keep track of who is donating what on Sundays. Most of our users are the Excel user; maybe they have data, but not a way to visualize it. It’s amazing to me how quantitative so many people are.

So how does Tableau Public differ from your enterprise product?

Well, the market we’re going after right now is individual content producers who might want to put data online. The New York Times (NYT) is often held up as an example of these good graphics, but an individual blogger doesn’t have a huge graphics department.

We offer the service for free, with some limits on number of views, and if the graphics take off, then maybe we’ve earned a paying customer. Also, on the free version, the data is public. It’s good for us because we get exposure, and it’s good for others because they get free access to the technology.

We aren’t immediately concerned about making money with Tableau Public. We already have a robust business selling to other businesses, so we sort of came to the freemium model backwards of most start-ups.

Can you guys really compete with the likes of IBM, SAP and Oracle?

Well, one big reason we get our customers is the whole visual analysis thing that is at the core of what we do. It’s unique to us. We’re also really well known for being easy to use and easy to deploy. A lot of times, what happens in enterprise software, you get these monolithic, giant systems that can be clunky and painful to add new features to. This can be true especially in the analysis arena.

The Dallas Cowboys are a good example. The sales manager there would go to his data guy and say, “I want to know how many jerseys I sold yesterday.” And they’d start giving all these technical answers about the data cube not being connected to the servers and so on. He was sold on us because he could plug in a complex spreadsheet, and we could tell him that answer in a very concrete way in a reasonable amount of time. It all goes back to having that Q&A with your data.

You are a professor of computer science and electrical engineering; you must have a pretty amazing early technology memory that turned you on to the sciences.

For me, it was just science in general, just being a nerd and a scientist. I remember when I bought my first chemistry set from a company now called Elemental Scientific. I remember that I was about eight or so, and most of the research I did was just so I would know what to buy. I saved up all my money and went to the store with my grandmother and came out with this giant box of retorts and flasks and all kinds of stuff. I had a great time the rest of the summer just doing reactions.

The other big thing with me and science was chess. I was the Wisconsin state chess champion in high school, and that is what taught me to really study things. I’ve always been more interested in ideas than technology I guess.

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The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100226/almost-famous-pat-hanrahan-of-tableau/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100113/microsoft-hp-announce-cloud-computing-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20100113/microsoft-hp-announce-cloud-computing-partnership/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:58:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=32572 Big news from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Microsoft (MSFT) today: A three-year alliance that will see them investing $250 million in a new cloud-computing venture.

In a buzzword-riddled press release, they said they “will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.”

Translation: HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform.

“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest possible total cost of ownership,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

“Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers,” Ballmer added, “and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”

Under the terms of the deal Microsoft and HP will collaborate on:

Virtualization
• Microsoft is now a preferred provider of virtualization solutions for HP, which will make it easier for a broader set of customers to deploy virtualization solutions that can improve server utilization by as much as 10 times and reduce provisioning ties from months to minutes.

• Microsoft and HP will deliver “smart bundles” for small and medium businesses. These are a combination of hardware and software, including HP server, storage and networking solutions, coupled with Windows Server Hyper-V and HP Insight software, delivered in a single, cost-effective package.

Management
• HP now has the rights to resell and ship System Center as part of HP’s solutions. This solution will be tuned, integrated and ready for customers.

• And coming soon, HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization solutions will begin to integrate and interoperate with Microsoft’s System Center suite of products. This means that customers with heterogeneous computing environments will be able to more easily and more cost-effectively manage hardware and software from Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems and applications.

Business Applications
• The companies will deliver a set of prepackaged and preconfigured data management and email solutions (“machines”) that will deliver data warehousing, business intelligence, online transaction processing and messaging solutions.

The Cloud
• HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services, and Microsoft continuing to include HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100113/microsoft-hp-announce-cloud-computing-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ibm-in-post-sun-rebound-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ibm-in-post-sun-rebound-acquisition/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 17:33:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16948 Looks like IBM found another use for some of the $6.5 billion it had considered using to acquire Sun (JAVA). This morning the company said it is acquiring Exeros, a data relationship discovery company that it plans to roll into into its business analytics unit. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Exeros’s technology is apparently very, very good at finding connections between data across multiple databases and IBM feels it will do much for the business intelligence efforts that it last bolstered with the $4.9 billion acquisition of Cognos. Said Lise Neely, product marketing manager for IBM’s enterprise management information tools portfolio, “IBM has data discovery features; the Exeros acquisition will improve it.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090505/ibm-in-post-sun-rebound-acquisition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20071112/ddv20071112/ http://allthingsd.com/20071112/ddv20071112/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:00:08 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071112/ddv20071112/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071112/ddv20071112/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos/ http://allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:01:39 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos/ “The business-intelligence space is undergoing massive changes. Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion was the first domino to fall. SAP’s deal with Business Objects is the second one. Now the question is, which will be the next domino to fall,” Gartner VP Andreas Bitterer asked last month. Answer: Cognos.

In a year during which Hyperion was bought by Oracle, and Cartesis and ALG Software acquired by Business Objects, which is itself being purchased by SAP, Cognos was the last of the independent business-intelligence software vendors and a particularly attractive acquisition target (IDC estimates the market for business intelligence is worth about $6.3 billion in worldwide software revenue).

No surprise then to hear that IBM has made a $4.9 billion bid for Ottawa-based Cognos. Big Blue will pay $58 a share in cash for the company–a 9.5% premium over its Nov. 9 closing price–which it plans to fold into its Information Management Software division.

Steve Mills, head of IBM’s software group, insists the company’s bid isn’t a knee-jerk response to the recent flurry of acquisitions in the business-intelligence space. “We never do acquisitions on defensive moves or based on what others are doing,” he said.

But it’s tough to take him at his word when the premium IBM’s paying for Cognos suggests there may have been a bit of a bidding war for the company. “Cognos was the last large publicly traded BI player out there,” said Paradigm Capital analyst Gabriel Leung. “The space is growing well. It was a defensive play by IBM. They’d looked around at what Oracle and SAP were doing.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos-2/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:01:39 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071112/cognos/ “The business-intelligence space is undergoing massive changes. Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion was the first domino to fall. SAP’s deal with Business Objects is the second one. Now the question is, which will be the next domino to fall,” Gartner VP Andreas Bitterer asked last month. Answer: Cognos.

In a year during which Hyperion was bought by Oracle, and Cartesis and ALG Software acquired by Business Objects, which is itself being purchased by SAP, Cognos was the last of the independent business-intelligence software vendors and a particularly attractive acquisition target (IDC estimates the market for business intelligence is worth about $6.3 billion in worldwide software revenue).

No surprise then to hear that IBM has made a $4.9 billion bid for Ottawa-based Cognos. Big Blue will pay $58 a share in cash for the company–a 9.5% premium over its Nov. 9 closing price–which it plans to fold into its Information Management Software division.

Steve Mills, head of IBM’s software group, insists the company’s bid isn’t a knee-jerk response to the recent flurry of acquisitions in the business-intelligence space. “We never do acquisitions on defensive moves or based on what others are doing,” he said.

But it’s tough to take him at his word when the premium IBM’s paying for Cognos suggests there may have been a bit of a bidding war for the company. “Cognos was the last large publicly traded BI player out there,” said Paradigm Capital analyst Gabriel Leung. “The space is growing well. It was a defensive play by IBM. They’d looked around at what Oracle and SAP were doing.”

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