Cognos acquires Celequest

Business intelligence vendor starts 2007 on the acquisition trail with purchase of operational dashboard vendor

Business intelligence (BI) vendor Cognos has acquired US-based operational dashboard vendor Celequest for an undisclosed sum.

Privately-held Celequest, which was founded in 2002, makes the industry’s only dashboarding solution that can be offered as an appliance or via a Software as a Service (SaaS), Cognos said.

The Canada-based giant argued that Celequest’s solutions would be attractive to departments or firms with limited staff and IT resources, due to its ability to be deployed quickly and at low cost.

“This gives us the opportunity to reach a new class of users who need to continuously monitor performance against key metrics and make decisions based on real-time, operational information,” commented Rob Rose, Cognos’s chief strategy officer.

Mark Smith, chief executive officer at market watcher Ventana Research, said the acquisition would provide Cognos with a complementary BI solution that “delivers on the operation intelligence derived from business events across an enterprise”.

Meanwhile, some experts have insisted the purchase signals Cognos’s intent to widen its BI portfolio to help it fend off acquisition attempts by larger rivals.

Reports surfaced last summer that IBM was close to launching a bid for Cognos, which reported turnover of $247.8m in its fiscal third quarter to the end of November.