IBM’s SPSS Buy Threatens Oracle, SAP And SAS

The Cognos purchase established IBM as a leader in the traditional BI space, he said. With SPSS, IBM will be able to offer a full solution that LeBlanc said “will enviably position the company in this sector for the foreseeable future.”
Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus agreed.

“For IBM’s competitive standing in the data management market, this acquisition represents one of the last missing pieces of its [IOD] portfolio,” Kobielus said in a blog post.

Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, called the SPSS acquisition a “capstone” to IBM’s IOD strategy.

“Starting with the base hardware, moving through core management,database and business intelligence offerings, IBM is providing all of the tools customers need to store, manage, and utilize their data to meet business needs,” Krans said in a report. “The addition of Cognos provided cutting-edge tools for drawing conclusions regarding existing data, while the purchase of SPSS allows customers to look to the future, identifying trends in data that predict future events.”

Users need analytics in a recession

Predictive analytics software is getting a lot of attention from businesses, with a key driver being the global recession. Companies are confronted with not only shrinking budgets but also the need to reduce risks and drive business.

Predictive analytics software is the other side of the coin from BI. Where BI software answers the historical questions of what happened and why, predictive analytics is focused on taking that information to predict future trends.

“In a lousy economy, you have to do everything you can to get that customer dollar,” Clay Ryder, an analyst with the Sageza Group who was at the IBM event, said in an interview. “It may sound crass, but it’s true.”

The more a business can learn about the customer and their buying habits, the more it can target products to that customer. It also improves the customer’s experience with the business.

“If you can be more in tune with the needs of the customers, it’s better than being just one of the many [companies looking to sell products,” Ryder said.

Given that need, businesses are looking to IT vendors not to simply sell them technologies, but to sell them solutions that will help their businesses. Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for SAS, said companies like SPSS and Business Objects were finding themselves increasing out of step with the demands of businesses.

Given the poor economy, “businesses don’t just buy technology anymore, they buy [technology] to solve a business problem,” Davis said, adding that SAS for the past couple of years has been pushing a solutions-based approach.

That seems to have worked for SAS, which recorded a record $2.26 billion in revenue in 2008. Davis said that is attributable to SAS not only offerings solutions, but also the demand for predictive analytics in a tough economy.