Cognos redefines business intelligence

"Today, the revolution we initiated with Cognos ReportNet™ two years ago continues," said Rob Ashe, president and CEO, Cognos. "With ReportNet, Cognos redefined enterprise reporting. With Cognos 8 BI, we are redefining enterprise business intelligence - providing a solid BI foundation for companies demanding a simpler path to complete corporate performance management."

Cognos 8 BI is based on the proven and powerful web services-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) first introduced with Cognos ReportNet™ in 2003. ReportNet is the fastest-selling product in Cognos history, generating more than US $235 million in license revenues and now in use by more than 2,500 customers worldwide.

"In a survey for TDWI's recent study, Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale, 66 per cent of respondents indicated that they wanted to transform departmental BI into an enterprise-standard solution," said Wayne Eckerson, director of research and services for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). "The ultimate goal is to provide more users with timely access to better, more consistent information, while reducing costs. The ability of Cognos 8 BI to meet the needs of a broad range of users with a single product will be attractive to enterprise BI customers."

In addition to simplifying the deployment of BI with a single product and architecture, Cognos 8 BI includes many enhancements to streamline the access to information for improved decision-making.

"This is the first BI product to eliminate barriers to data access. Extended open data access capabilities allows the complete range of BI functionality - reporting, analysis, dashboarding, scorecarding and event management - to be performed against any organisational data, helping to eliminate information silos that can inhibit decision-making," said Graham Walters, EMEA vice president, launching Cognos 8 in Dubai during Gitex 2005.

Cognos 8 BI's comprehensive reporting capabilities are suitable for business style and production and business style reports, real-time dashboards, as well as ad-hoc queries. To simplify the exploration and discovery of information, Cognos 8 BI makes it easier for users to perform complex analysis, even against very large data sources. Enhancements include the ability to apply compound filters, nest subsets of information, and compare different levels of information - all with drag-and-drop ease.

Cognos has joined with leading vendors to enable right-time, process-aware business intelligence. This integration makes it easy for users to access business intelligence as part of an established business process. Scorecarding has been enhanced with advanced initiative tracking, enabling managers to monitor actions and decisions to correct and improve performance associated with a key metric.

As part of its open data access, Cognos 8 BI capabilities can natively access Cognos Planning and Consolidation data. Using Cognos 8 BI, production reports that show budget vs. actual can be easily created, as can alerts that track budget variances and proactively notify management before any damage is done. Agents can even be created to monitor the status of plan and budget completion.

"Building on the successful combination of Cognos ReportNet™ and IBM's DB2 Universal Database, we are pleased to have worked with Cognos on the development of Cognos 8 BI," said Karen Parrish, vice president, worldwide business intelligence solutions at IBM. "Cognos 8 BI combines the power and scalability of IBM's middleware with Cognos' proven, easy to use analytics solutions. The focus of our partnership continues to be on delivering increased business value to customers by providing fast, easy access to critical information with a lower total cost of ownership."