Every few years I get involved in a project that requires a list of mainframe vendors to be produced. This task in itself can be quite dull and trivial. The interesting part comes the following year when it needs updating. There are always so many companies that have been swallowed up.
What started me thinking about this again was the news recently about IBM taking over Cognos. Is this a sensible move for IBM? With so many other companies out there, why choose that one? Well IBM has recently been partnering with Cognos, Business Intelligence, and Hyperion to deliver BI (Business Intelligence) to customers. Hyperion was recently taken over by Oracle, and two other BI vendors, ALG Software and Cartesis were acquired by Business Objects, which in turn is being acquired by SAP. So maybe IBM needed to get Cognos before someone else did.
And if that’s the case, who was its main rival? That’s difficult to say, IBM may well have been worried by Oracle or SAP getting their hands on Cognos. But perhaps the most likely rival was Hewlett-Packard. HP offers a business intelligence and data warehousing platform built using products from Cognos. HP may well have felt that getting their hands on Cognos would have been a natural fit – and now IBM has blown that idea out of the water.
It looks like Rob Ashe, the CEO at Cognos is to join IBM, and Cognos will become part of IBM’s Information Management Software division.
But going back to last year’s list of vendors, I notice that Acucorp is now part of Micro Focus, Consul is now also part of IBM, Cybermation was swallowed by CA, Diversified Software is part of ASG, and Farabi belongs to Seagull Software. And that’s just the first half of the alphabet!
Talking of lists... if you’re a vendor, consultant, or service provider, and you would like a free entry for your company in the 2008 edition of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, you should complete the form at www.arcati.com/vendorentry.html. If you had an entry in the 2007 Yearbook, you can use the form to amend an existing entry. If you are a mainframe user, then the annual survey form is at www.arcati.com/usersurvey08.html. The Yearbook will appear early in 2008 and is free.
Also, Tuesday 4 December at 10:30 CST (4:30 GMT) is the first free Webinar for the virtual IMS user group at www.virtualims.com. The virtual user group meeting will last about an hour and includes a presentation by NEON Enterprise Software’s Kristine Harper. It’s free to join the group and take part in the virtual meeting.
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