IBM wants to go head-to-head with the likes of Oracle and EMC for enterprise customers in the market for comprehensive, real-time business analytics systems.
As eCRM Guide reports, today’s $1.7 billion, all-cash purchase of Netezza firmly positions Big Blue in this rapidly growing software and services sector.
For Netezza, which already bases its product portfolio on IBM’s hardware, a key selling point for enterprises is the ease of deployment.
“Together, with the power of IBM solutions and services, we’ll be able to create business solutions with appliance-level simplicity, incredible return on investment for those customers that actually help them change fundamentally the way they do business,” Netezza President and CEO Jim Baum said in a video announcing the acquisition.
IBM on Monday said it had reached an agreement to acquire Netezza, a publicly traded firm specializing in business analytics, for roughly $1.68 billion in an all-cash deal.
For Big Blue, the acquisition will expand its business-intelligence offerings, extending to clients an easy-to-deploy solution that can glean sharp insights into massive stockpiles of unstructured data.
“IBM is bringing analytics to the masses,” Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Software and Systems division, said in a statement.
At its core, IBM’s acquisition of Netezza (NYSE: NZ) comes in response to the demand from enterprise clients for sharper business-intelligence and analytics tools that has turned information-management software, including database management systems, into a brisk growth industry.