Another day another acquisition for IBM, since IBM and Oracle Larry Elision exchanged words about DB2. Initiate Systems is a provider of Master Data Management products and has very strong product line.
Initiate’s particular strengths lie in the health care and government sectors. Oracle has Hyperion's Master Data Management Tool renamed "Data Relationship Management" (DRM), but not as many clients use this as Initiate systems.

News
IBM Buying MDM Vendor Initiate Systems - CIO news

- IT World Canada

Infoworld News

Highlights

- Cognos 9 will include Social Networking Feature
- Embed recent purchase of SPSS predictive analysis
- Will not include Cloud Services yet

[Via Infoworld]

Highlights
- Washington D.C. Center will focus on Federal Government, academia and other institutions in the Washington Metro Area on analytics projects
- 400 to 500 professionals through retraining or new hiring
- IBM has opened five other analytics solution centers—in New York, Dallas, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo and India

[Via Eweek.com]

Highlights

- The center, called the Business Analytics Center of Competency
- Located in Bangalore, India
- Will have over 200 employees
- The new center will focus on a number of areas including Web 2.0 analytics, risk and fraud analytics, financial analytics, customer analytics and enterprise business analytics strategy

[Via Computerworld]

Posted by Doug Henschen:
Copyright: http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com

Cognos stands out by offering in-memory based analysis software TM1 database for now until Microsoft and others catch up.

Can IBM compete against Microsoft's "built-in for free" when organization uses the combination of Microsoft Office, SQL Server and SharePoint. Yet to be seen.

[via InformationWeek]

1. Product is targeted to companies with 100 to 999 users (less than 100 concurrent users)
2. Product uses, existing easy to drag and drop style and Excel for analysis and reporting
3. Easy to install and configure
4. Pricing for Cognos Express starts as low as US$12,000 for one module and five users.
5. Restaurant company Wood Ranch is one of the first users of Cognos Express says that Excel interface to Cognos Xcelerator is a plus
6. Cognos Express products helps the Restaurant chain to pull all the data and conduct modeling and forecasting.

Read more about the IBM Cognos Express
[via Techworld]