Netezza Sold to IBM for $1.7B Will Help Big Blue Tackle Big Data
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The hits keep coming for IBM in Massachusetts—and this one is a biggie. The company (NYSE: IBM) announced this morning it plans to acquire Marlborough, MA-based Netezza (NYSE: NZ), the business analytics and data warehousing firm, for about $1.7 billion in cash. It will be Big Blue’s 18th acquisition of a company based in the Bay State (or with significant operations here) since 2003, and the largest since Cognos in 2008, which went for $4.9 billion. The news comes on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Boston-area companies Unica last month and OpenPages last week.
IBM and Netezza have worked together for years — Netezza says its entire product platform is based on IBM hardware. No surprise, then, that IBM would target it as it bolsters its presence in analytics, a market it believes will be one of its main sources of growth in the future. In the last four years alone, IBM has made 23 analytics-related acquisitions totaling $12 billion.
