CDP anticipated IBM's Cognos buyout

IBM’s offer for Cognos had been well anticipated by CDP, the exclusive distributor for Cognos in New Zealand for more than the past 20 years.

“There’d been so much conjecture over the past three years about IBM buying Cognos that we looked at it ages ago, about what we should be doing if that played out,” says CDP director Allen Keyte.

“Cognos is known for its strength out front with business intelligence and performance management. It’s not so well known for data warehousing but CDP does a lot of that. It’s a matter of defining what a data warehouse is, but we’ve been staging data for our customers for years.

“The majority need to restructure their data because it comes from multiple sources.”

CDP has around 300 customers.

Keyte says it made a lot of sense to work with IBM since it bought the data stage technology from Ascential a few years back. This is now tied closely into WebSphere.

“Put simply, it’s about information integration,” he says. “One of the biggest up and coming pieces is master data management. There’s going to be a lot more emphasis on that going forward. It’s about getting a single view of a customer or product.”

CDP became an IBM partner some time ago. “It strengthens where we are going down the path of information integration,” Keyte says.

There have been no discussions at this stage about the status of the exclusive arrangement CDP has with Cognos.