Cognos set to acquire Adaytum

Cognos, a provider of business intelligence (BI) systems, is set to purchase privately-held Adaytum, a provider of Enterprise Performance Planning (EPP) for $160 million in cash.

"With this acquisition, Cognos significantly improves its position in Corporate Performance Management (CPM), providing deep domain experience in BI, scorecarding, and now EPP," reports ARC Advisory Group in its weekly newsletter.

The acquisition is expected to be completed in January.

"With trailing twelve months revenue of around $57 million, Adaytum has more than 1,500 customers worldwide including Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Kellogg’s, Pfizer, 3M, and American Express," ARC reports.

ARC Director of Supply Chain Research Steve Banker says, "Cognos is a leader in the BI software category. There has been a movement of BI suppliers into Corporate Performance Management (CPM) because CPM is seen as the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. The rhetoric is that CPM lets organizations measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels across the enterprise. Furthermore, CPM is believed to enable the complete financial management cycle with integrated software for strategic and operational goal setting, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding. While CPM tools do speed the financial forecasting and reporting processes, the strategic goal setting process supported by most CPM solutions is a heavy handed top down process that leads to static KPIs that do not reflect changing market realities. Until CPM providers understand best practices on setting dynamic, market driven KPIs, CPM implementations are apt to do more harm than good.”