IBM getting into the BI mix
Well the dust has barely settled after the Oracle purchase of Hyperion and IBM gets into the market with the $161m purchase of integration specialist DataMirror to extend their information on-demand strategy
What does DataMirror do?
Well their technology identifies and captures data that has been changed in some way and delivers the changed data in real time to databases and applications, such as data integration platforms or business intelligence (BI) reporting tools, and ensures that the information held in these systems remains accurate and up-to-date.
What’s IBM doing in this space?
Its not the first deal in this space – This is the twenty-first acquisition in IBM’s information on-demand strategy, to which the company last year pledged $1bn investment over three years.
The IBM pitch on all of this is that they “quietly going off behind the scenes and building up a very strong [data management] platform”. Our take on this is that IBM are starting to move away from a pure play infrastructure / middleware strategy and starting to compete in the application space. Sure this one looks infrastructure related but add in components such as Assential, Alphablox and ManyEyes and we start to see the makings of a BI stack – what other applications are next!