And IBM, as a long-time partner dating to Cognos's inception in 1969, is Cognos's largest partner in such areas as joint sales and professional services and integration services. As a result, IBM expects to make Cognos synergistic with IBM rapidly, an essential ingredient to a purchase of this size, said Mills in a call today with analysts. Another apparently enticement to the IBM grab of Cognos at this time was Cognos's own acquisition recently of Applix, an OLAP and corporate performance management vendor, for $339 million in September, with an eye to the mid-market. IBM also appears interested in straddling two trends in the BI and information lifecycle markets, said Mills. On one hand, customers want openness, ease in federation of data, and modularity. On the other hand, they need complete solutions that offer breadth across data warehousing and business metadata to provide that pre-emptive analysis of what's happening in their complex businesses.