By Francis Moran
The announcement this morning that global computer services company IBM has struck a deal to acquire Ottawa’s Cognos will end months of speculation over who would eventually claim the largest remaining independent business intelligence software company. However, the disappearance from the public markets of Ottawa’s second-largest (after Nortel) publicly traded company is sure to reignite the hand-wringing over why this town can’t seem to create and sustain many large public companies. Bridgewater Systems’ announcement earlier this month that it was planning an initial public offering will do little to assuage the angst.
Ottawa’s IPO drought was made all the more dramatic to me at an event I attended in Boston on Thursday evening last week where fully four CEOs in a room of fewer than 100 members of the TiE Boston network were recognized for taking their companies public over the past year. Collectively, the four had a market cap roughly equal to Cognos’s pre-IBM-bid value of just over $4 billion, meaning that just within that small room, there was enough new public market activity to essentially counter the loss of a Cognos.
When will Ottawa be able create enough new public companies each year to offset the inevitable loss of our Cognoses?
