IBM bags Ilog

By Alex Kayle for IBM
Johannesburg, 13 Mar 2009

IBM has finalised its $340 million tender offer for the shares of Ilog, a French-based company. Since 2001, IBM has acquired more than 50 companies.

According to the company, Ilog will become part of the IBM WebSphere software portfolio. IBM says the acquisition will strengthen its business process management (BPM) and service-orientated architecture (SOA) position in the global market.

This acquisition forms part of the extensive number of companies acquired by IBM in recent months, a move which Charles Senabulya, IBM executive for sub-Saharan Africa, says “will allow IBM to leverage the expanded portfolio of products to best serve customers and address niche business problems around the globe”.

The announcement was made at the IBM Smart Software Symposium, held at The Campus in Bryanston. The symposium helps IBM's customers better understand the IBM acquisitions and how it will add to its portfolio of technology offerings. Some of IBM's noteworthy acquisitions include CrossWorlds, Rational, FileNet, Telelogic, Cognos, Tivoli, WebSphere, Lotus and Information Management.

Senabulya says IBM is continuously looking for the right acquisitions that make sense to the IT giant's business strategy in capturing market share. “The acquisitions add to our existing technology and give us the ability to continually embrace customer issues and their challenges.”

IBM is aggressively expanding into the emerging IT markets of sub-Saharan Africa, and the acquisitions made are to leverage local skills and talent in the market, Senabulya says. “Our intent as we move forward is about taking a local approach to technology. It's about trying to say from an IBM perspective that we are here. We have all these people with capability and we have the ability to bring those to bear in a local market. It's important to think local while tapping into a global knowledge and technology base.”

One of the largest investments made by IBM in the skills development sphere on the continent was the Africa Innovation Centre, which was unveiled last year.

Senabulya says: “IBM tries to remove the complexity out of business problems. The biggest challenge we're seeing at the moment, due to the global economic crisis, is around cost and how companies get business efficiency out of their existing investments from a technology perspective. While this has been happening for many years, it is now the norm and not the exception. Companies are facing huge cost pressures and this will continue for some time.”

Headquartered in Paris, Ilog has more than 2 500 customers, 850 employees and operates in 30 countries around the world.