IBM to buy SPSS

[Mark Palmberg]

International Business Machines Corp. agreed to buy SPSS Inc. for $1.2 billion, further expanding into analytics and information-on-demand software.

Chicago-based SPSS develops statistical software for survey and scientific research along with marketing, government and educational purposes.

The all-cash offer is $50 a share, a 42% premium to SPSS's closing price Monday. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

IBM said it is expanding its focus on business-analytics technology and services to meet a growing client need to cut costs. According to IDC estimates, the world-wide market for business analytics software will grow by 4% to $25 billion this year.

[Victor Kogler]

Well, that woke me right up.  At least they weren't bought up by Microsoft.  Wonder what this means for the future of SPSS?  Will IBM take on SAS in the big iron arena? 

IBM already has a 'business intelligence' product - Cognos.  Does SPSS currently compete with Cognos?  If so, it may be time to say goodbye to an old friend.  Will SPSS and Cognos remain separate products, will one assume ascendancy, or will they merge into a single application?  Whatever happens will take 2-3 years to unfold, but I think I might start getting serious about learning R.





Mark Palmberg wrote:

International Business Machines Corp. agreed to buy SPSS Inc. for $1.2 billion, further expanding into analytics and information-on-demand software.

Chicago-based SPSS develops statistical software for survey and scientific research along with marketing, government and educational purposes.

The all-cash offer is $50 a share, a 42% premium to SPSS's closing price Monday. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

IBM said it is expanding its focus on business-analytics technology and services to meet a growing client need to cut costs. According to IDC estimates, the world-wide market for business analytics software will grow by 4% to $25 billion this year.

[John McConnell-2]

Victor

 

For the most part Cognos and SPSS are complementary products. The former is more about “mainstream” Business Intelligence - Reporting/OLAP/Business Performance Measurement/Dashboards and so on -  whereas SPSS offers the Statistics/Data Mining/Predictive Analytics.

 

There is some overlap - If you look to stuff in SPSS like OLAP Cubes/Tables and forecasting in Cognos-  but I don’t think these areas would be seen as “core” to either product. Probably not from the IBM perspective.

 

Hence I’d expect SPSS to be around for a while in some form.

 

John

 

From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Victor Kogler
Sent: 28 July 2009 17:15
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: IBM to buy SPSS

 

Well, that woke me right up.  At least they weren't bought up by Microsoft.  Wonder what this means for the future of SPSS?  Will IBM take on SAS in the big iron arena? 

IBM already has a 'business intelligence' product - Cognos.  Does SPSS currently compete with Cognos?  If so, it may be time to say goodbye to an old friend.  Will SPSS and Cognos remain separate products, will one assume ascendancy, or will they merge into a single application?  Whatever happens will take 2-3 years to unfold, but I think I might start getting serious about learning R.





Mark Palmberg wrote:

International Business Machines Corp. agreed to buy SPSS Inc. for $1.2 billion, further expanding into analytics and information-on-demand software.

Chicago-based SPSS develops statistical software for survey and scientific research along with marketing, government and educational purposes.

The all-cash offer is $50 a share, a 42% premium to SPSS's closing price Monday. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

IBM said it is expanding its focus on business-analytics technology and services to meet a growing client need to cut costs. According to IDC estimates, the world-wide market for business analytics software will grow by 4% to $25 billion this year.