Cognos teams with Google to deliver business intelligence search solutions

Cognos has announced its support of Google OneBox for Enterprise, a feature of the Google search appliance.

Business intelligence (BI) is critical to an organisation's decision-making; however, it has historically not been available to enterprise search solutions. As a result of the Cognos Google tie-up, companies can allow any end user to instantly gain access to enterprise performance, driving mass adoption of BI across the organisation.

Informed decisions

This will help more users make informed business decisions, driving better overall enterprise performance. Users will simply type in keywords and phrases into the Google search bar, and see the most relevant Cognos BI content at their fingertips.

'With this alliance, Google and Cognos are combining the ease of searching with Google with the best of BI,' said Rob Rose, chief strategy officer at Cognos.

'With this alliance, Google and Cognos can help companies enhance the value of their BI deployments by making full report content, from financial to operational reports, searchable by anyone in the organization. Now, finding information from within corporate data sources is as easy as performing a Google search for a PowerPoint.'

Through joint development efforts with Google, Cognos is extending the capabilities of its Cognos Go! search service by allowing reports, analyses, dashboards, key metrics, and alerts to be directly accessed through the new Google OneBox for Enterprise.

This user-friendly, breakthrough solution will enable a far-greater range of users in an organisation to take advantage of strategic enterprise information, leading to better overall performance management.

Cognos Go! delivers search results through Google OneBox in three modules. First, the Cognos Go! Report Module delivers - right at the top of the search results - instant answers to common questions. These are displayed as graphical charts, tables, and maps that provide users with an at-a-glance understanding of a business issue.

The Cognos Go! Metric Module provides a visual representation of a related key performance metric and its status. Finally, to give users additional context, the Cognos Go! Search Module presents the most relevant links to other BI information, such as related alerts, dashboards, reports, or analyses.

Natural way

'Search is the natural way for people to quickly and easily find answers or information to help drive their business in the right direction,' said Dave Girouard, VP and general manager of Google Enterprise.

'By opening the world of business intelligence to our search capabilities, enterprise customers will gain secure, easy access to a wealth of information about corporate performance directly through Google search.'

Cognos Go! search service, works with Cognos 8 BI, a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance.

As a single product that easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardisation and performance management.