Information Advantage Inc, the Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based relational OLAP software vendor, has signed an agreement to acquire IQ Software Corp, the Atlanta-based seller of decision support tools, in an attempt to marry its OLAP expertise with IQ’s query and reporting software to offer a complete package of business analysis software. The $65m all stock deal will see IA issuing approximately 9 million new shares to IQ’s stockholders, giving them 37% of the combined company. The deal is seen as yet another response to the imminent arrival of Microsoft Corp’s ‘Plato’ which is widely expected to end up dominating the low end of the expanding OLAP market. Arbor Software Corp and Hyperion Software Corp are coming together for much the same reasons (CI No 3,418). Larry Ford, IA’s CEO, said he was positioning the two companies for the realities of the new competitive landscape, post Microsoft. Ford predicts that Gates’ giant will dominate OLAP for both the desktop the departmental NT server, and our strategy will be to support Plato aggressively as an alternative data source, he said, with IA linking to Plato via an API interface. Meanwhile, riding on the growth in OLAP generated by Microsoft, Ford said a combined Information Advantage and IQ Software would differentiate itself by offering companies a high end integrated business intelligence suite. Ford said he expects the third space in the market, the applications space, would be left to Arbor/Hyperion and Oracle Corp. Information Advantage and IQ Software, in the past twelve months, would have had combined revenues of $55m and 420 employees. The deal is to be accounted for as a pooling of interests. Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp announced the release of SQL Server 7.0 beta 3 on Monday, including OLAP services derived from Plato, and began sending the software to more than 50,000 sites, its broadest ever release for relational database management software.
