IBM Advances Analytics With Acquisition of Coremetrics

IBM announced Tuesday an agreement to acquire Coremetrics, a privately held business analytics software company. Financial terms were not disclosed. With Coremetrics' acquisition, IBM will be able to deliver new business analytics solutions, including tools that give managers real-time insights into sales trends, and web analytics capabilities to help measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and customer interactions. Coremetrics' Customers include Bank of America, Holiday Inn, Office Depot, Victoria's Secret and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

"With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities to give clients greater insight about customer behavior and sentiment about products and services, and give true foresight into their future buying patterns," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere. "Marketing departments can benefit from these capabilities very quickly because we are delivering this in a Software-as-a-Service model. The combination of IBM and Coremetrics will maximize marketing expenditures and also make the buying experience more convenient, personal and interactive for consumers."

"Marketers increasingly need the ability to see across their organizations and the agility to make split-second decisions based on real-time data," said Joe Davis, CEO, Coremetrics. "The combination of Coremetrics and IBM will deliver deeper business insights to address the real challenges and opportunities all companies face in an increasingly digital world."

Coremetrics' acquisition is another move by IBM in direction to consolidate in the business analytics market, and to extend the company's analytics strategy, with an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years. The main steps in this direction were when IBM bought Cognos in 2007 and SPSS in 2009.

Boris Evelson, an analyst of Forrester Research, commented: "with the acquisition IBM has a chance to integrate Web analytics into its core BI platform. Currently, companies that want to do such integration have to rely on consultants and customized development. Fellow mega-vendors Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have made various attempts at entering the Web analytics market, but so far with little success. None of the large BI vendors, they don’t really have anything comparable”.