IBM today announced it has completed its acquisition of Cognos, a publicly-held company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. IBM will reveal its business strategy for the Cognos acquisition during a press briefing on February 6.

IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos last November for a price of nearly $5 billion. IBM acquired Cognos to accelerate its "information-on-demand" strategy, a cross-company initiative that combines IBM's strength in information integration, content and data management, and business consulting services to unlock the business value of information. Through this acquisition, IBM and Cognos said they intend to become the leading provider of technology and services for business intelligence and performance management. The companies said they intend to deliver the industry's "most complete, open standards-based platform with the broadest range of expertise" to help companies expand the value of their information, optimize their business processes, and maximize performance across their enterprises.

The Cognos acquisition supports both IBM's acquisition strategy and capital allocation model, and will contribute to the achievement of the company's objective for earnings-per-share growth through 2010, the company said. To date, IBM has announced 25 strategic acquisitions in support of its global information on demand effort.

Additional information about IBM's information on demand strategy is available at: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/information-on-demand/. For more details about the combination of IBM and Cognos see: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/info/cognos.