TIBCO Software Inc. today announced an agreement to buy Insightful Corp., a provider of statistical data analysis and data mining applications, for roughly $25 million in cash. The deal fulfills a promise TIBCO executives made in March, when they announced first-quarter financial results, that the company would make an acquisition move before long.
The definitive agreement, expected to close in the third quarter, is aimed at expanding TIBCO’s footprint in the business intelligence arena. The application infrastructure software provider took its first step into the BI market segment a year ago by acquiring Spotfire, Inc. for $195 million in cash. That acquisition has proved lucrative. In the first quarter, TIBCO reported that Spotfire accounted for more than half of the license revenue in the company’s business optimization line, adding $8 million to cash flow that quarter.
Now, TIBCO plans to add Insightful’s applications to its business optimization portfolio, complementing Spotfire’s Enterprise Analytics platform in particular, according to prepared statements from both companies. TIBCO’s product lines are grouped into three main areas: SOA technology, business optimization applications, and business process management tools. The company says it serves 3,000 customers worldwide.
The Spotfire and Insightful acquisitions demonstrate TIBCO’s shift in focus, according to AMR Research analyst Ian Finley. “They’re pointing their guns at data and how you analyze it as it flows through a high-volume environment” rather than waiting for it to arrive in a data warehouse for analysis, he said in an interview with Managing Automation. With this “stream computing,” approach, he added, TIBCO is allowing users to look at the “stream of data, rather than the oceans of data,” in real time.