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IBM agrees to buy Cognos for US$5B
IBM has agreed to buy business intelligence software vendor Cognos for around $US5 billion in cash, in a bid to expand delivery of BI beyond the traditional user base. The move follows a period of consolidation in the BI and performance management software market, where Oracle bought Hyperion, while Cartesis and ALG Software were snapped up by Business Objects, which is itself being swallowed by SAP. Cognos also bought the much smaller performance management software vendor Applix earlier this year. The acquisition will especially be a blow to IBM rival, Hewlett-Packard, which offers a business intelligence and data warehousing platform built using products from Cognos. To some analysts, the move into BI applications marks a new strategy for IBM, which has long said it doesn't want to compete with partners in the application market. More>>
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Marsh's Urbandale office to grow
Marsh and McLennan Cos. plans a $31 million expansion of an Urbandale office scheduled for completion next year.
The risk and insurance management company's expansion would bring 450 more workers to the office complex that will be home to 1,300 existing workers, Rob McGinnis, chief executive of Marsh's U.S. consumer business, said Wednesday.
The project now under construction calls for 215,000 square feet at Paragon Office Park at 123rd Street and Meredith Drive in Urbandale. The expansion would add 50,000 square feet. The total cost of the complex was not available. . More>>
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Virtualization's Killer App - Server Consolidation
Network World's Tom Henderson and Rand Dvorak published Part II on their series about virtualization technologies. In Part II, Taming The Virtual Beast , the examine products that help you manage and provision virtual environments. As part of the analysis, five areas are considered with looking at VM management technologies:
How are VM snapshots versions assembled and subsequently tracked? How are moves, adds and changes of VM hosts, their guests, the kind of applications used on them administered? How is VM and application availability monitored? How are user and administrative roles managed across VMs? What forensics mechanisms are available to help determine why a VM was drastically altered in any way? There's certainly one other are I would want explored; performance management in a virtual world. More>>