Cognos announces wireless, event-driven BI with Cognos NoticeCast

Business intelligence company, Cognos, has announced Cognos NoticeCast, a solution that monitors business transactions and events as they occur and provides broad-based wireless alerting.

Cognos NoticeCast is tightly integrated with its latest release, Cognos Series 7 and provides organisations with a way to monitor and alert on information in business intelligence, transactional or operational systems such as ERP, supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), or any relational data store.

Designed for use by business and technical users alike, Cognos NoticeCast notifies and alerts decision makers, just in time, to issues with customer relationships, supply chain activity, sales and financial performance, or any other business event.

"As companies deploy business intelligence capabilities on an enterprise scale, they need to deliver critical business information in the form of alerts, exceptions, and drillable reports to increasingly mobile users across a variety of channels, including the Web, personal digital assistants, pagers, wireless phones, and so on," says Peter Gerson, MD of Cognos SA. "Series 7 provides a business intelligence framework that lays the foundation for companies to manage overall business performance management from the bottom up."

Explains Gerson: "Sending only the personalised information relevant to an individual or group, Cognos NoticeCast narrowcasts critical business intelligence reports or analysis as well up-to-the-minute operational event information to users via e-mail, digital cellphone, or personal digital assistant (PDA)."

"Using a dynamic addressing feature, Cognos NoticeCast offers the automated intelligence to determine the exact individual to whom the alert should be directed," he adds. "An organisation could monitor, enterprise-wide, issues with a particular product by tracking logged complaints in the CRM system. If particular customers call in with complaints about the tracked product, Cognos NoticeCast ensures that the information goes only to the account representatives who are responsible for those customers. The solution also automatically prevents the duplication of alerts, thereby maintaining the high value of the information received.

"Organisations benefit from the powerful interplay of robust business analytics from Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos NoticeCast`s narrowcast, push BI functionality, to pinpoint true business patterns and build agent alerts based upon that intelligence," says Gerson.

With intuitive, easy-to-use, agent-based technology, Cognos NoticeCast provides users across the enterprise with alert and event detection for the following:

• .         Notification Events: monitoring for the availability of new events such as changed or updated reports;

• .         Performance Events: monitoring variances in business performance measures;

• .         Operational Events: monitoring business risks/opportunities in the operational data as they occur.

"With Cognos NoticeCast, we offer a solution that addresses the real-world requirements and challenges of today`s decision-maker," he concludes.

"Cognos NoticeCast gives organisations a business-driven solution to empower each individual in the company - from customer support specialist to sales rep to CEO - with access to time-sensitive information and the context needed to make effective decisions."