August 4, Timothy Prickett Morgan. That said, IBM is perfectly willing to spend money on fast-rising companies in what it perceives to be hot markets that it can leverage its global scale with to turn them into profit engines.
ILOG, in case you have never heard of it, is based in Paris, France, and is a publicly traded company whose shares trade on the Euronext exchange in Europe and the Nasdaq exchange in the United States. The company got into the supply chain area after it raised cash from its initial public offering in when it bought a company called CPLEX Optimization, which was based in the States, and ported its tools to the Java platform as that programming language and runtime took of in enterprises.
NET environment on Windows boxes. In April , ILOG bought one of its own customers, LogicTools, a maker of supply chain applications focused on inventory optimization. The company currently has 50 channel partners of its own and around employees. So that helps cushion the cost a little. Moreover, ILOG doubled in size over the six years between fiscal and fiscal and was decently profitable in , , and , and was profitable in the five years running from through And as we all know, these companies have been hurting badly in recent quarters because of self-inflicted wounds and other financial follies.
Look at the numbers. ILOG sports some ISVs using its tools and over 2, end user companies worldwide who do the same, including those various supply chain optimization tools. IBM is buying up the shares in what is called a cash tender offer, and already had commitments from key shareholders to buy their shares representing 10 percent of the total shares outstanding before it announced the deal last Monday. IBM needs to get its hands on There are a bunch of regulatory hurdles the two companies have to jump through first, and there is always a possibility that someone else could swoop in and try to steal the company away.
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But since then, they have been drifting lower. It looks to me like investors are tired and they would probably like to have some IBM shares, which have risen by 30 percent since January and which will probably rise some more if IBM hits its ambitious financial goals in and If this deal closes, they will have some money to invest in Big Blueβor perhaps in oil futures or maybe even in land some place where the sun shines strong and the wind blows hard.
