Dubai Municipality selects BSG for "EHSA" - the centralized statistics system

BSG's solution is based on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Platform.

According to Mr. Saeed Ibrahim AbdulRahman, Head of Statistical Database Automation Section at DM Statistics Centre, EHSA or Centralised Statistical Information System is regarded as the largest project and the strategic plan for the statistics center is implemented in line with the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President & Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

"We are extremely delighted that Dubai Municipality has reposed their trust in BSG and the Cognos products and look forward to working closely with them to address their BI needs as well as to forge a long-term, strategic partnership for our mutual benefit", said Nasser Tufail, Managing Director at BSG.

Cognos is ranked as the number one BI vendor by all leading industry consultants, including Gartner. Cognos provides tightly integrated BI products that support the entire lifecycle of Data Warehousing and Corporate Performance Management, encompassing reporting, ad-hoc query, OLAP analysis, scorecarding, visualization and event management, as well as budgeting, planning and consolidation.

The scope of this project entails extraction, transformation and integration of large amounts of disparate data at different levels of granularity into a centralized data-warehouse based on Oracle 10G database. This will be achieved by deploying IBM's Ascential and Websphere products. The information from this data will then be disseminated in the form of standardized reports to a large number of users. Additionally, the data has to be made available to a different set of users for Ad-hoc reporting, Dashboarding and OLAP analysis.

"We would like to also mention that we are delighted to have an opportunity to work jointly with IBM on this very high profile project. We have worked with IBM in the past and look forward to expanding our relationship with them", Tufail added.

Cognos and IBM have had a long standing worldwide relationship, and recently IBM elevated Cognos to its highest tier of strategic partner alliances. Cognos is the preferred BI partner for IBM Global Consulting Services. Since DM already has investments in IBM products, we hope to take advantage of the Cognos integrated technologies for such products as WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Information Integration Suite to deliver cost-effective solutions that offers flexibility, rich functionality and ease of use to support better business decision making for our joint customer.

"From our experience in deploying similar BI solutions based on Cognos, we are confident that we will be able to address all the needs of various DM users, from executive management who need high-level summarized data for policy decisions, to analysts who require detailed information to observe trends and build forecasts and on down to the operations level staff and general public who require statistical indicators and other focused information", said Raheel Khan, Regional Manager at BSG.

"Cognos offers the simplicity of a zero-footprint web architecture that is easy to use, deploy and administer, yet highly scalable to support thousands of users in future, and DM's investment in Cognos technology and a future-proof architecture should translate into lower overall total cost of ownership", Khan added.