When you think that IBM has an integration challenge in front of its management teams, think again! This shopping spree has been ragging for a while now as I commented just a few days ago on it OpenPages acquisition. Check out the impressive list of IBM’s acquisitions since 1999 (http://bit.ly/9hcYA3)!
Big Blue must have been catching a Decision Management bug as it has announced today yet another acquisition in the Analytics world. Netezza represents the largest Analytics acquisition for the giant: $1.78B! As a reminder, IBM has already spent $12B in 23 analytics acquisitions in the past 4 years — SPSS being up to now the largest ($1.2B).
You can better understand IBM’s motivation based on its projections of analytics sales (hardware, software and services) growing from $9B last year to $16B by 2016. IBM’s current estimation for the market size today is roughly $100B!
Netezza provides data warehouse appliances with strong analytics capabilities to helps large enterprise make strategic decisions. This component expands the portfolio of technologies and solutions available to its customers in the fairly recent Analytics and Optimization Centers it opened around the world.
This announce is certainly timely in the context of bidding war between HP and Dell over the data storage company 3Par Inc. (finally acquired by HP for $2.07B). Very interesting dynamics between the platform vendors that are also fighting over Security market.
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