A lot of hand-wringing resulted from the Cognos acquisition about how Ottawa was being gutted of head offices – as if the acquisition would prompt IBM to put the IP on crates and ship it to India, or somewhere else. (Ironically, just a few years prior tech pundits were in a high-anxiety state about the lack of multinational tech tenants in the city.)

In today’s Ottawa Citizen story by Bert Hill, it now appears IBM is Ottawa’s biggest tech employer with 2800-plus employees and “growing”, according to his story.

As a former Cognos employee from the pre-IPO days who got to share in the excitement of one of the first handful of software IPOs in the world, I too was sad to see the Cognos brand taken down from its familiar home on Riverside Drive.

But I also know that many pre-acquisition and post-acquisition Cognos employees have or will start up new companies in Ottawa. In fact, I worked in one of them 01-05, a mid-market analytics software company called Databeacon, bankrolled in part by Cognos founder and CEO Mike Potter, that was later sold to … Cognos.

It’s great to see OCRI doing its part to celebrate Rob Ashe and the growing IBM team as winners in our tech community. They deserve the kudos. Thanks again for the post.