Cognos extends the reach of business intelligence across enterprise

Cognos, a leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), has announced the latest version of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (MR1).

This new version of Cognos 8 BI includes new search and reporting capabilities to extend the reach of business intelligence to more users, and expanded enterprise-application and data support to help maximize operational infrastructure investments.

'We are continuing our market leadership by further enhancing the proven capabilities in Cognos 8 BI,' said Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing, Cognos.

'With the additional support for enterprise applications in Cognos 8 BI, we can help companies unlock the potential of their ERP investments by providing intuitive ways to measure, monitor, and analyze business information. Cognos 8 BI also allows companies to share that information with more people to improve and accelerate business decisions, and empower people to take action with greater confidence.'

Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified, zero-footprint interface for all users, authors and administrators. Easy to integrate, deploy and use, Cognos 8 BI delivers a complete BI environment that drives high user adoption, promotes self-service authoring, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale technology foundation for performance management. New capabilities announced today include:

'Cognos Go! Search Service, a new BI search capability, will enable users to instantly find relevant, strategic enterprise information available through Cognos 8 Business Intelligence,' said David Brierley, regional manager, Cognos Middle East and Africa.

'With a familiar, browser-based search that ranks results based on user priorities, Cognos Go! will deliver users an intuitive and efficient way of quickly finding BI information and data presented in reports, analyses, dashboards, metric information, and events across the organisation.'

In addition to the ability to embed refreshable reports within Microsoft® Excel®, users can now view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft PowerPoint® and Excel.

This ensures centralised control and manageability of information and helps extend the reach of trusted BI content to more users within a familiar environment without requiring additional IT support. Cognos Office Connection enables users to enhance Microsoft Office documents with accurate, rich data, and share those documents and BI content throughout the organization.

'Cognos 8 Business Intelligence delivers significant productivity benefits for end users, report developers, and IT organizations with the new search, reporting, and enterprise-application support capabilities,' said Dan Vesset, research director, Analytics and Data Warehousing Software, IDC.

'Organisations are constantly challenged to extend BI to more users and more data sources and with these enhancements, Cognos is meeting a market demand to provide one holistic view of historical and current operational data in one product. I would expect a positive reaction to the Cognos 8 Report Packs and the extended self-service capabilities for SAP NetWeaver users.'