My interpretation of the rise of tools like Looker & Tableau is that they happened in part because of that '07-'08 acquisition spree. Neither IBM not SAP capitalized on their investments, and instead their products mostly stagnated. Cognos 11 for example looks more modern bit really isn't much more than a re-skin of a product that hasn't changed much since the release of 8.x. At some point IBM had a Watson-branded product that was supposed to be a Tableau competitor, but it never really materialized and was near completely divorced from Cognos.