CIO — There's no denying that 2007 has been a groundbreaking year for enterprise application vendors that appear to have vaults of cash to spend on strategic acquisitions—and all signs point to more M&A fever in the near future.

While SAP and Oracle have spent billions to gobble up both small startups and sizeable competitors, one very attractive enterprise software vendor has remained undeniably available throughout all of this corporate wooing: Cognos. The company's business intelligence and performance management suite of applications brought in nearly a billion dollars in revenue for fiscal year 2007 and has a market cap of $4 billion. Cognos has more than 23,000 customers in 135 countries, and the company claims that its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. (There's no mention of how the rest of its 22,900 customers are performing.)

Speculation around Cognos's availability cranked up once SAP announced its purchase of Business Objects in early October. That's because after SAP swallowed Business Objects, Cognos became the largest publicly traded BI player, and "therefore next in line to be acquired by any vendor keen to bolster its competitive standing in BI or compete more effectively in this arena with SAP," according to Krishna Roy, an enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. In other words, Cognos became the next best option for any vendor looking to round out its portfolio with a timely business intelligence buy.

Business intelligence is red hot these days. Roy notes in a report on Cognos that, while some software markets are experiencing a slowdown in growth, BI shows no sign of doing so. "Most market estimates suggest that the BI market grew between 11 percent and 15 percent in 2006, with the expectation that growth rates will land in a similar bracket this year," Roy writes. As such, Cognos would be a nice pickup for a vendor looking to get in on the action. For any suitor, it "would be a way to ride the BI growth train and witness increases to the would-be acquirer's top and bottom line," she notes.

So just who are the likely candidates to make a run at Cognos? Roy's short list includes the usual suspects: HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. For HP, Cognos would fill a number of product holes "in reporting, analytics, dashboards and scorecards, and performance management applications, and therefore enable it to become a bona fide BI vendor capable of taking on the likes of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and others in this sector," she writes, adding that HP and Cognos already have a fairly close relationship. In addition, HP would get some cross-sell opportunities for its hardware and infrastructure software.

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