Business intelligence stalwart Cognos Inc is quietly pleased with its second quarter results, and particularly with the performance of some of its newer products acquired over the past year, so it will no doubt be looking to its latest acquisition Interweave Software Inc (see Top Stories), to contribute even further to its success. The company saw second quarter profits up 46.5% at $11m including a $5m write-off relating to the acquisition of UK neural networker Right Information Systems Inc (CI No 3,100), on revenue that rose 26% to $58m. New products such as PowerPlay Web Server, Scenario, the entry level data mining product launched earlier this year as a result of Cognos’ acquisition of KnowledgeSeeker from Angoss Software Inc (CI No 3,127), and 4Thought from Right Information, apparently contributed $2m in sales in the second quarter. The Interweave acquisition, for which Cognos will pay $13m cash and assume liabilities of $3m, should extend the company’s web-based offerings by enabling data to be collected from one or more data source anywhere on the web. The company has also launched DataMerchant, a data management and deployment tool for electronic commerce, enabling companies to package, sell and distribute data over the web. President and chief executive Ron Zambonini said the new products added to the breadth of Cognos’ offering, and resulted in more than half of the quarter’s license sales coming from new accounts. The company believes it is moving up from providing departmental systems to providing systems for the whole enterprise. Its whole web strategy seems to be about opening business intelligence to more users, not necessarily just the power users with powerful personal computers. However, Zambonini admits the same web- enabled strategy that is driving Cognos is also making customers re-evaluate what they need, and therefore slowing buying decisions. He believes the company will see a slower rate of growth in the next few quarters while customer decide which way to go next.
