Cognos announces Cognos Series 7, the industry`s most comprehensive BI solution

Business intelligence company Cognos has announced Cognos Series 7, its most comprehensive, enterprise-class business intelligence (BI) solution to date.

Cognos Series 7 is designed to provide organisations with true mission-critical business intelligence offering enhanced consistency, performance, reliability and scalability. It automatically delivers time-critical BI to decision-makers through e-mail and wireless technologies. Cognos Series 7 will be locally available from January 2002.

According to Peter Gerson, MD of Cognos in SA, Cognos Series 7 marks a watershed moment in the business intelligence market. "Cognos has always delivered `firsts` to the market. We were the first company to bring business intelligence to the market with a product that later became Impromptu and delivered the first business intelligence solutions to the Web," says Gerson.

"Today we are first with a solution that will put the broadest range and depth of functionality in the hands of tens of thousands of users. Cognos is racing out in front of the market, with a solution that addresses and exceeds the requirements of today`s enterprises."

Designed to surpass the expectations of today`s enterprises, the Cognos Series 7 BI framework provides scalability to tens of thousands of users, robust Unix and Microsoft support, unmatched performance and reliability, and a `no-compromise` breadth and depth of application choice that reflects the needs of enterprise user communities. It works with an enterprise`s own user authentication and security systems, simplifying the deploying of BI over the Web.

Tested in some of the largest and most complex customer environments, Cognos Series 7 enables businesses to address more business challenges than with any other business intelligence offering on the market today. Offering the full spectrum of BI capabilities with robust reporting, analysis, ad hoc query, scorecarding, visualisation, and datamart creation, Cognos Series 7 delivers a business intelligence environment that allows users to navigate information intuitively and manage business performance from a central portal. This results in significant task time-savings and the reduction of database traffic.

"Cognos Series 7 is enabling organisations to reconstitute themselves as BI-optimised, intelligent enterprises. Using Cognos Series 7, organisations can drive intelligence across and deeply into the distributed enterprise, connecting every team, every department, and every business unit and process. Each contributor to the value chain, whether inside or outside of the institution, is guaranteed an integrated, intuitive business user experience," says Bob Moran, research vice president and managing director, Decision Support, Aberdeen Group.

"Cognos builds on these intelligent underpinnings with the new Cognos NoticeCast, out-of-the-box operational event monitors. Thus Series 7 is a compelling business intelligence solution - an information environment that once again demonstrates why Cognos continues to be one of the leaders in the BI marketplace."

Cognos Series 7 provides today`s enterprises with an exceptional combination of broad-based information delivery and an integrated, unified user environment backed up by an enterprise-class BI framework.

With the addition of Cognos NoticeCast, tightly integrated into the Cognos Series 7 BI framework, customers get access to new monitoring and alerting on business performance and operational events, providing up-to-the-minute information as key events occur. Business users can manage customer relationships, supply chain activity, sales and financial performance, and overall business health like never before. They can also access critical business information, and be alerted to key business events via e-mail, digital cellphone or personal digital assistant (PDA).

With Cognos Series 7, customers can benefit from the powerful interplay of business analytics from Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos NoticeCast`s narrowcast, push BI functionality, allowing them to pinpoint business patterns and build agent alerts based upon that intelligence.

Cognos Series 7 offers Unix and Windows support, excellent features with support for SSL and LDAP, as well as the high performance, reliability and scalability demanded by enterprise customers.

"Cognos Series 7 also offers enterprise environments the lowest total cost of ownership for a business intelligence solution," continues Gerson. "Through centralised security, administration, and content management, as well as easy application deployment and configuration management, Cognos delivers the BI solution that easily fits into any enterprise environment with a minimum of IT effort."

Cognos Series 7 further reduces the total cost of ownership by allowing users to access the industry`s broadest range of BI functionality whether from the Cognos portal environment or integrated with any other third-party portal offering or application. With integration across the meta data layer, security and interface, users have one place to serve all their BI needs.

"Cognos has always been about giving business users incredibly easy-to-use business intelligence. Cognos Series 7 takes that commitment a quantum leap forward," says Steve Talsma, senior consultant at EDS. "With an integrated user environment and the breadth of solution options represented by Cognos Series 7, Cognos delivers the right information to any enterprise user - from the CEO to the plant worker - at the appropriate level of detail."

Cognos Series 7 supports a wide range of platforms Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX, Windows NT, 2000, 95, 98, ME. As well, Cognos Series 7 provides support for Microsoft SSAS 2000, SAP BW 2.0B and 2.1C, Essbase and IBM DB2 OLAP, as well as natively supports Teradata, IBM DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase and ODBC relational data stores.

For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at www.cognos.com