IBM to buy SPSS
Thursday, 30th July, 2009
IBM is buying SPSS, for $1.2 billion. Here is IBM’s press release.
I smelt something fishy earlier this year when SPSS renamed their flagship stats package from SPSS Statistics to PASW Statistics. PASW stands for Predictive Analytics Soft Ware.
It seems like a strange acquisition to me. Maybe IBM want a high-street brand in their portfolio. What else do they hope to get out of the acquisition? Surely they don’t need the back-end statistics software?