What the Schneider acquisition of Cognite actually changes, and what it does not
On 30 June 2026, Schneider Electric agreed to acquire Cognite for 3.1 billion dollars. If your operation runs on that platform, the useful question is not whether the deal is good news or bad news. It is which of your assumptions were about the product, and which were about who owned it. This page is a calm read of what an acquisition of this kind changes, and a list of questions worth taking into your next renewal. Most of them apply no matter whose platform you run.
The mechanics
Four things move when ownership moves
None of this is specific to one company. It is what happens structurally whenever a software vendor is bought by a larger one, and it is worth keeping separate from the question of whether the acquirer will run the product well. That second question has no answer yet.
The four below are the ones that touch a contract you have already signed.
Roadmap authority moves
Whoever owns the company decides what gets built. Priorities that were set by a founding team answering to its own board are now set inside a larger portfolio, alongside products with their own customers and their own claim on engineering time. That is not a prediction about direction. It is a change in who chooses the direction.
The product becomes a line in a portfolio
A standalone platform is the whole company's reason to exist. Inside a large industrial group it sits next to control systems, electrical equipment and other software. Portfolios get rationalised, packaged and cross-sold over time. Ask where your product sits in the new structure, and who owns the result for it.
Support and procurement get renegotiated
Account teams, support tiers, reseller arrangements and framework agreements are usually harmonised onto the acquirer's model. Your named contacts may well stay for a while. It is the commercial machinery behind them that changes, and it changes at renewal.
Hosting can move, and residency follows it
Where your operational data legally sits follows from who operates the infrastructure and which law that entity falls under. If hosting is consolidated onto the acquirer's arrangements, that answer can change without the product changing at all. It is something to ask about, not something to assume.
Being straight
What nobody can tell you yet, including us
We build a competing platform, so read this section as the one where we say what we do not know. It is also the section that should make you sceptical of anyone using this deal as a sales trigger.
Anyone stating the following with confidence today is guessing.
Four things that are genuinely unknown
- Whether pricing changes at your renewal, and in which direction.
- Whether service gets better, worse, or stays exactly as it is. Acquisitions have gone all three ways.
- What the roadmap looks like in two years. The people who will decide that are still deciding it.
- Whether any of this reaches you at all. Plenty of acquisitions are invisible to customers.
The renewal conversation
Eight questions worth taking to your account manager
These are not traps, and your account manager will have reasonable answers to most of them. The point is to have the answers written down before the renewal rather than discover them during it. Ask them of every vendor you run, including us.
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Who owns the roadmap now, and how do we get heard?
Ask concretely. Which entity sets priorities, what is your escalation path into it, and does the user group or advisory forum still exist in the new structure. A vague answer here is itself information.
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What does our contract say about a change of control?
Most enterprise agreements carry an assignment or change-of-control clause. Read yours. It tells you whether anything is triggered, what consent you had to give, and which rights you kept. Your legal team can settle this in an afternoon.
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When does the agreement renew, and what notice do we owe?
Automatic renewal dates and notice periods decide how much room you have to move, and when. If your notice window closes six months before renewal, now is the time to know that.
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Where does our data legally sit, and who operates it?
Not which region. Which legal entity operates the infrastructure, and which jurisdiction can compel that entity. Ask what would have to happen for the answer to change, and whether you would be told in advance.
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What does an exit actually look like?
Ask for the export in detail. Formats, how complete it is, and whether the asset model comes with it or stays behind as vendor configuration. A vendor that can describe its own exit path calmly is a good sign, whoever they are.
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Which integrations do we depend on, and who owns them?
Connectors, partner-built ingestion and third-party tooling around the platform often sit with parties who are themselves affected by a change of ownership. Map that dependency before you need it.
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How concentrated is our supplier base now?
If the acquirer also supplies your control systems, electrical equipment or engineering software, a previously independent vendor may now account for a much larger share of your operation. That can be perfectly fine. It should be a decision rather than a surprise.
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What is our plan B, and have we ever tried it?
Most operators have a theoretical answer here and have never tested it. Pull a slice of your data out and load it somewhere else, once. The exercise usually teaches you more about your lock-in than a contract review does.
Data residency
Where data sits is a legal question
Residency is usually discussed as a map problem, and it is not one. The address of a data centre says very little on its own. What decides it is which legal entity operates the infrastructure, and which country's courts and legislation can compel that entity to hand something over.
That is why a European region operated by a company under foreign legal control does not close a sovereignty requirement by itself. It also means the answer can change when hosting is consolidated after an acquisition, even though nothing visible to a user has changed.
If sovereignty is a procurement requirement in your sector rather than a preference, ask about corporate structure. Ask who signs, who operates, and what would have to be true for the data to sit somewhere else next year. Then write the answer into the contract instead of the slide deck.
Whoever you buy from
Making yourself robust to the next one
There will be another acquisition in this category, and you will not get advance notice of that one either. The useful response is not to find a vendor nobody will ever buy. It is to hold the parts that matter closest to you.
Three habits do most of the work, and none of them requires changing vendor.
Own the model
The description of your assets, your processes and the relationships between them is the expensive part, not the software that stores it. If it lives in vendor configuration and a consultant's head, it leaves when they do. Keep it exported, versioned and readable.
Prefer formats you can leave
Documented storage and open interfaces make an exit an export job. Proprietary formats make it a negotiation. Check this when you buy, because at renewal you have no leverage beyond what you wrote down at signing.
Test the exit once a year
An untested exit is a belief, not a capability. Pull out a year of data and a slice of the model, load it somewhere else, and see what breaks. Half a day a year, and you know exactly what you own.
Us, briefly
Where we fit on that list
We build an operational data platform, so we are one of the options you might look at, and the rest of this page should be read with that in mind. We are four people in Stavanger, one senior engineer, two juniors and a marketing lead. The platform is open source under AGPL-3.0, runs on your own infrastructure or on hardware we own in Norway, and uses standard components throughout, which is our answer to the exit question above.
We are not the right answer for everyone. If you need a large vendor organisation with named 24/7 support and formal certifications on day one, say so early and we will tell you honestly that it is not us. If you want the comparison rather than the pitch, that lives on its own page.
Common questions
What operators are actually asking
What happened between Schneider Electric and Cognite?
Schneider Electric agreed on 30 June 2026 to acquire Cognite for 3.1 billion dollars, with Cognite Data Fusion to be integrated into Schneider's AVEVA business once the deal completes. Completion is subject to regulatory approvals and had not happened when this page was last updated. Cognite was originally spun out of Aker, and the seller describes the sale as the largest Norwegian software exit to date.
Do we need to do anything about it?
Probably nothing urgent. The first piece of work is reading your own contract for change-of-control, assignment, renewal and notice terms, and writing down where your data legally sits and what an export would look like. That is useful whether or not anything else changes.
Will prices go up?
Nobody outside the transaction knows, and a vendor telling you otherwise is guessing. What you can do is establish when your renewal falls, what notice you owe, and what an alternative would cost, so the conversation happens on your terms rather than on the calendar's.
Does the acquisition change where our data is stored?
Not by itself. Residency follows the entity that operates the infrastructure and the law that entity falls under. If hosting is consolidated later, the answer can change without the product changing, which is why it is worth asking now what would have to happen and whether you would be told.
Are there alternatives if we decide to look?
Yes, and they come in several shapes. Another enterprise platform, a historian plus a data warehouse, building on open-source components yourself, or an open-source operational data platform like ours. We have written the honest comparison on its own page, including where we are the wrong choice.
Working through a renewal?
If the checklist above raised something you want an outside view on, send it over. We will tell you what we would ask, whether or not you end up talking to us about a platform. If you would rather read code than talk to anyone, that option is open too.
Cognite, Cognite Data Fusion, Schneider Electric and AVEVA are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. IntelliStream is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Cognite or Schneider Electric. The acquisition facts on this page are as the companies announced them on 30 June 2026, and the transaction had not closed when this page was last updated on 25 August 2026.