IBM's furious Analytics aquisitions

Is anyone keeping up with IBM and their propensity to obtain Analytics based companies?  Let's see if we can do a recap of IBM in the news in the last couple of years. 

• Acquires COGNOS for $5.0 billion in November 2007
• Acquires ILOG for $0.34 billion in July 2008
• Acquires SPSS for $1.2 billion in the same month July 2008
• Acquires Netezza for $1.7 billion in September 2010

In actuality there is an estimated $12 billion dollars of 23 Analytics based companies that IBM has acquired in the last few years.  That is quite a leap for a hardware/software/IT company.  IEOR Tools has talked about IBM's emergence as an analytics company before with new analytic centers and acquisitions.  I think its safe to assume that IBM is the de-facto analytics champion in the world right now.

So what does this mean for Operations Research and their professionals?  I believe it means the sky is the limit now.  This is a grand opportunity for the Operations Research community.  In fact I would even say that if INFORMS does not take advantage of the recent demand for analytics and decision sciences then they are missing this big picture.  Jobs should be plentiful in the foreseeable future.  There should be plenty of work to keep management happy and help drive value into organizations.  This may even be the dawn of a new day for Operations Research and Analytics.  There is so much buzz now it will leave a ringing in your ears.  Sure I might be a little optimistic but I think any news is good news right now in this economy.

I also believe that IBM is not done.  I think IBM is going to evolve even more in the Analytics realm.  Perhaps getting more involved in the software within Operations Research and statistics.  Its just a guess but who knows if SAS, Matlab, or even contributing to open source projects like R, RapidMiner  or Weka.  This is an exciting time none of the less for Operations Research.