IBM’s Information Management $20B Five Year Acquisition Budget

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IBM has executed a total of 12 acquisitions since January 2010, proceeding with its strategy of continually enhancing their product portfolio with best-of-breed technologies that are complimentary to their present solutions. Most noteworthy are three of such acquisitions that have occurred since mid-August:

  • Unica, a Marketing Planning company on August 13, 2010

  • OpenPages, an Integrated Risk Management company on September 15, 2010

  • Netezza , a Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics company on September 20, 2010

IBM’s Information Management arm continues to grow by acquiring companies that complement their existing products. The most recent acquisitions have really created a buzz around the Ironside Group, not only because all three of the most recent acquisitions have been clients of the Ironside Group, but also the trend of acquiring companies in business analytics to significantly expand IBM’s offerings in this field allows us to bring even more creative and innovative offerings to our customers. IBM has spent more than twelve billion dollars to buy twenty-three companies in this field over the past four years, including Cognos.

IBM’s Acquisitions: Unica, OpenPages, and Netezza

The acquisition of Unica by IBM will help Big Blue to grow and expand its Business Analytics offering. Unica has helped its customers optimize their marketing planning capabilities with features like personalized marketing campaigns and website visitor analysis to make organizations Marketing departments (which are normally a total expense) run more effectively and efficiently.

OpenPages provides Integrated Risk Management Solutions for companies across the world. They’ve aimed to help companies adapt in a turbulent economic environment to what they call a “New Era of Risk Management.” It’s acquisition by IBM seems to be part of IBMs business analytics strategy as well, by helping customers to develop a risk management strategy, which helps C-level executives to understand how certain risks might impact their organization’s upcoming performance.

The last acquisition of the three most recent was Netezza. Netezza is a particularly interesting purchase for IBM’s Cognos customers. Netezza makes hardware and software which is used by its customers to combine their storage, server, and database functions into one system. Users benefit by analyzing huge amounts of complicated information and finding trends in the data. Netezza will complement IBM’s business analytics strategy to help its clients gain faster insights into their business, with increased performance at a lower cost. Netezza currently offers a data warehousing appliance that hosts a top-of-the line analytics solution, which with a little help, can be up and running in about a day. It can handle complex queries more than ten times faster than its traditional competitors. Like IBMs other business analytics offerings, Netezza’s ease of use and deployment make it a solution that is usable by business users and technical users alike.

We’re excited to see what will happen next at IBM and as always will work with your organization to develop these creative and innovative offerings and technologies when developing a Business Intelligence and Analytics Strategy best suited to ensuring success with your company’s BI initiatives.