As IBm is acquiring cognos , what will be the impact on the people working on it? Is it good for developers or bad?
No one knows for sure but this is my guess:
On Technology side: It will stay same for couple of years but they will consolidate the product line. Take Lotus Notes for example it is still kind of independent product line.
On Releases: The frequency of releases may taper down to one release a year or 18 months. Right now, you have two minor releases every year e.g.8.1 and 8.2...
On Services: There will be a fight between Cognos Prefered Vendors or certified partners and IBM Global Services as to who is better off.
Cognos Development and Consulting Staff: There won't be any short term replacements at middle and low level.
So, in summary, it wont be dramatic change in short term but long term, users and IBM will bring changes to the product line, release pattern, consulting. Hyperion (Oracle) may look at it as an opportunity to improve its image. So, what is the impact for people like me and you, I Don’t know.
There is going to be a battle between IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to become the first vendor to get BI tools onto every desktop in the enterprise. Google may also hop in with something in Google Apps. IBM is also very active in Enterprise 2.0 - they have several mashup alphas that could use a BI front end and the Lotus suite. They need dashboards in quite a few products like the Information Server. We could see a lot of new development in the next twelve months bundling Cognos products into IBM suites and putting more collaboration features into BI tools.
Just 2 weeks back we were discussing about Cognos and Microsoft, with microsoft releasing new BI products almost similar to cognos, i was guessing Cognos will be acquired by Microsoft!!
I foresee some of the Cognos products will be discontinued in years to come,
example datamanager, as IBM has good ETL tool. and other matching products.
Will be good, I guess
Notes is a great sample, it's independent and bigger than was.