Cortell Business Solutions, a global intelligent business solutions provider and Applix partner, has announced that Cognos, a global provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Applix. Cognos expects the acquisition to be completed in the fourth calendar quarter of 2007.
Greg Bogiages, director at Cortell Business Solutions, says until the acquisition is finalised, this announcement will have no impact on its current business.
"This is very positive news for Cortell; we believe this is a tremendous opportunity for two great organisations to transcend the boundaries of traditional performance management and business intelligence to deliver the industry's most comprehensive financial performance management environment."
According to Cognos CEO Rob Ashe, this acquisition is a terrific strategic fit for Cognos. "Applix will broaden its solution offering and provide Cognos with an innovative, 64-bit, in-memory analytics capability. It will also bring into the company a very strong employee and customer base that has been committed to performance management through high-impact analytics. This is another major step forward for Cognos in delivering leading performance management solutions to finance and across operations."
Applix will complement Cognos flagship products - Cognos 8 Planning, Cognos 8 Controller, and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - specifically in the area of financial performance management. Applix performance analytics will give customers new and enhanced capabilities to analyse and optimise financial performance.
This will include improved analysis and optimisation of large, complex financial performance data; strong finance self-service capabilities such as business rules management; new solution areas including profitability analysis; and innovative technology, including Applix TM1, a patented, 64-bit, in-memory multidimensional OLAP server.
"We believe that this combination represents a great opportunity for the entire Applix community," said David Mahoney, president and CEO at Applix. "Our customers, partners and employees will become an important part of Cognos, which will allow the company to further enhance its position as a leader in the analytics market. Our organisations are very complementary, and I feel that they will blend together to create a leader in the financial performance management market."
Bogiages believes this merger will offer the potential for Cortell to reach a completely new level of interaction with its customers, offering them a more compelling set of analytic and performance management applications. "When you look at the combination of Cognos and Applix, you will see a number of potentially strong synergies including a stronger overall offering in the office of finance, more product breadth for extending into non-financial applications, and increased resources for further product innovations."
"This combination of Cognos' already-proven financial performance management products and the agility offered by Applix with TM1 will now provide an extremely comprehensive technology foundation capable of driving performance management initiatives in the office of the CFO and beyond," concludes Bogiages.
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Cortell Business Solutions designs and implements intelligent business solutions for a vast cross-section of clients on a global scale. The company is associated with Cortell International, which has projects in Canada, the US, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Since its inception in 1992, Cortell has invested a great deal of time, conceptual thinking and manpower in developing business intelligence methods and performance measurement tools.
In 1996, Cortell expanded into an international company that currently operates from offices in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and North America. Today, Cortell forms a nucleus of ventures across the globe. While each company within the group maintains its individuality, it shares people, knowledge, expertise and world-class technology to deliver similar solutions to its clients.
Cortell Business Solutions focuses on extracting business intelligence information for the measurement and management of critical business processes and issues through the design, development and implementation of large-scale modelling, budgeting, and reporting solutions; performance management systems to render operational excellence and achievement of financial results; executive information systems to help managers keep their "fingers on the pulse"; customer and market intelligence to provide insight into customer profitability, relationships, and services; and costing systems to identify ineffective processes or products.
Operating in the financial services, health services, logistics, public sector, manufacturing, and tertiary education industries, Cortell has offices in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and US.
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