Cognos stays on offense

Someone or something seems to have lit a fire under Cognos in the past month or so. Word on the street (and in this blog, truth be told), was that they were starting to get passed by in the performance management and BI market by the aggressive moves of Business Objects, as well as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Even in analyst notes, the sense was that Cognos was getting left behind while others were charging forward, whether it be with new branding, new acquisitions, or catchy new Flight of the Conchord's song parodies...

But clearly this is not the case. On the heels of a huge BI win with Nestle' , as well as the announcement of the Applix acquisition, they’ve also announced a deeper strategic partnership with Informatica to resell their data integration and data quality tools within their performance management offering.

Now, Cognos partnering with INFA is not new—the companies have worked together for years. But based on the the moves by Business Objects in this space, as well as the overall success of the Business Objects Enterprise Information Management products in the market, this move makes sense.

Having an integrated data quality and integration story is key to enhancing overall performance, and it's a topic that business audiences and CFO's alike are more than comfortable in both talking about and evaluating in terms of the technology out there. So this agreement should clearly shore up an issue likely being raised in the field around Cognos’ capabilities in this area.

What may be more surprising is that Cognos has never outright purchased INFA, although it’s one of those “logical” acquisitions that people have been talking about for years. Perhaps this is “step 1” down the path, or perhaps Cognos feels that this is not technology that is costing them deals by not having it native to their own applications.

Whatever the reason, they’re clearly ratcheting up the activity in the market as of late, which is good for customers all around.