In the midst of a back-to-school shopping season for technology firms looking to shore up their portfolios before market valuations rise again, IBM in July offered $1.2 billion to acquire SPSS Inc., a predictive analytics specialist founded more than 30 years ago.
At first blush, the deal may have appeared redundant to those who recalled that IBM spent nearly $5 billion in late 2007 to acquire business intelligence and analytics software provider Cognos. But the two product sets are distinct and complementary, said Mychelle Mollot, director of worldwide marketing for business intelligence & performance management in IBM’s software group.
“Right now, the BI software that we provide — the query, reporting, and analysis component of the Cognos software — gives people a great view at that historical perspective. But SPSS completes the time horizon by giving people the ability to look at what could happen in the future if these patterns continue or if they were to tweak the business model in various ways.”
Analysts agree. Having executed a number of acquisitions to build out its information management portfolio, including the Cognos deal and less flashy pickups such as data integration-focused Ascential and unstructured-content specialist FileNet, IBM still lacked “a high-powered analytics engine,” wrote John Hagerty of AMR Research in analyzing the deal.