Solid Software Shifts

Cognos Inc. announced new offerings that deliver integrated Applix and Cognos functionality. IBM Corp. unveiled its plan to acquire Solid Information Technology Ltd.

Focal Points

• Cognos, a company that IBM is in the process of acquiring, revealed key product integration and customer initiatives based upon software of its recent Applix acquisition. (See Experton Group Weekly IT News Snapshot "IBM BI and Mainframe Moves.) The new products – Cognos TM1 Server, TM1 Excel, TM1 Web, and TM1 Executive Viewer – are available immediately and leverage a patented, 64-bit, in-memory multidimensional server. The Cognos TM1 offerings allow business analysts to create and evolve the performance management solution with the changing business requirements without extensive IT support. The company is also extending its functional and industry Performance Blueprints with TM1 technology. The first TM1-enabled Performance Blueprint will extend life sciences blueprints that address a critical sales and marketing investment area for Samples Allocation and Sales Quote management. The new blueprint will be available to customers free of charge in first quarter 2008.
• IBM announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Solid Information Technology, a privately held database software company based in Cupertino, California, and Helsinki, Finland. Financial details were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008. Solid was founded in Helsinki in 1992. It has hundreds of major customers worldwide with a strong presence in the communications industry. There are over three million deployments of solidDB software. The company will be integrated into IBM Software Group's Information Management Software Division.
• Solid's software, solidDB, uses in-memory database technology to quickly retrieve data from a computer's memory. This technology enables data access and storage at speeds up to ten times faster than using traditional disk-based database systems. SolidDB measures its read response times in microseconds and can handle tens of thousands of concurrent transactions. Additionally, solidDB 6 can recover from system failure within milliseconds, providing 99.999 percent availability. The software maximizes use of system resources while requiring almost no hands-on administration, resulting in much lower total cost of ownership, according to the company.

Experton Group believes the new IBM software moves advance its strategy of offering a full range of information management software solutions that can be leveraged through cross-selling opportunities. SolidDB will complement IBM's DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server solutions and will make IBM's solutions more formidable in enterprises looking for availability, extreme response times and transaction loads, and scalability. While SolidDB is a natural fit, IBM may have more difficulty leveraging Cognos applications, even though it has had Cognos as a business partner for a number of years. IT executives looking at acquiring the Cognos or SolidDB solutions should consider negotiating and closing the deal before the acquisition is completed, as the opportunity to negotiate pricing or terms and conditions is better during the transition period.