Data integration software firm Tibco Software Inc. said today it’s buying rival business analytics firm Information Builders Inc.

Tibco didn’t disclose how much it’s paying for Information Builders, but Reuters cited an unnamed source that said the sale values Information Builders at about $1 billion. In any case, Tibco said the acquisition will be the largest in its history once the deal concludes.

Information Builders was founded way back in 1975, and is known as a pioneer in business analytics and reporting software. The company’s main offering is its WebFocus platform, which provides tools for data visualization and reporting, and for distributed, embedded and augmented analytics.

“With the acquisition of IBI, we gain access to a broader set of analytics and technology, greatly enhancing our ability to help the world’s leading organizations solve their most complex data problems,” Tibco Chief Executive Dan Streetman said in a statement. “The blend of our two companies, with strong and complementary capabilities, will further unlock the potential of real-time data for making faster, smarter decisions.”

Information Builders also sells data management software that includes data preparation, integration, quality and governance tools.

The company has been privately owned throughout its long history by its founder and Chairman Gerald Cohen, who only stepped down as its CEO in January 2019.

“We founded Information Builders with a vision of a new business intelligence product that would enable non-programmers to build their own reporting applications,” Cohen said in a statement. “We are proud of what IBI has accomplished in over four decades of innovation, and it is a privilege to join forces with a company that cares about its customers as much as we do. I am looking forward to a very bright future for our solutions, our team, and especially our customers.”

Tibco has made several acquisitions in recent years as it bids to expand its presence in the business analytics and data management market. In 2017 it acquired a startup called Nanoscale Inc. that sold tools for creating microservices, which are small bits of code that can be combined into more complex applications. At the time, Tibco said that acquisition would help it extend its data consolidation and analytics tools into a broader range of networks that incorporate edge computing.

In 2018 Tibco bought data management firm Orchestra Networks SA, which helps to consolidate information from different systems and make it accessible via a single “pane of glass.” Then last year it added SnappyData Inc., a creator of a high-performance in-memory data platform based on Apache Spark that brought real-time data analytics to its list of capabilities.

Tibco said Information Builders would augment its main Connected Intelligence platform that’s used to aggregate and analyze data from various enterprise systems, devices and application programming interfaces. For example, Information Builder’s data quality, data prep and data integration tools will support Tibco’s Any Data Hub and Responsive Application Mesh strategies, the company said. Meanwhile, the WebFocus platform will enrich Tibco’s Hyperconverged Analytics platform, it said.

“Tibco is bidding to gain more relevance with enterprises and it is not shy to put down a lot of money to achieve that,” Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE. “It is a smart move as it complements the existing Tibco offerings and expands the share of wallet it can go after.”

Tibco said it hopes to complete the acquisition by the first quarter of 2021.

Image: Tibco