Cognos, the leading strategic vendor of enterprise business intelligence (BI) for e-business, has announced the availability of PowerPlay 6.6 and Cognos Query. Fully integrated with the Cognos enterprise BI platform and leveraging the benefits of the BI portal, common security model and common meta data model, PowerPlay 6.6 and Cognos Query complete Cognos` Web infrastructure for e-business.
The Cognos enterprise BI solution addresses the full range of customer needs from managed reporting and self-service ad hoc interaction against both OLAP (online analytical processing) and relational data sources in addition to business performance scorecarding, high-end visualisations and business performance management reports. All of this is managed within a rich portal environment providing users with a single Web-based point of personalised access to Cognos BI information and non-BI content.
With the Cognos BI portal, organisations create an environment for collaborative decision-making. Users access reports, gain insight, publish these insights back to the portal and share their findings with other users.
Additionally, the BI portal provides Information Technology (IT) departments with a single point of delivery and management of content. The Cognos BI Portal can be implemented standalone for organisations without an enterprise portal strategy, or as a BI channel in a company`s established portal strategy.
PowerPlay 6.6 (http://www.cognos.com/powerplay/new.html) adds a complete managed reporting solution over the Web. Now, any user with a standard Web browser and Adobe Acrobat can access, view and print reports created by a PowerPlay Web, Microsoft Excel or Windows clients, using a common XML-based report format. This ensures that all classes of users whether inside or outside of the organisation can get access to key information in highly formatted reports regardless of their expertise or training level.
Integrated with Cognos leading OLAP server, managed reports take advantage of all the proven scalability and deployability advantages of the Cognos architecture.
"Cognos` end-to-end Web solution delivers the key analytical and reporting functionality users have been demanding," said Bob Moran, managing vice president of decision support research, Aberdeen Group Inc. "Cognos` powerful e-business solution enables all users, whether they prefer to work in Windows, Excel, or through their Web browser, to leverage PowerPlay to create reports and publish them to the portal. Because these reports are dynamic, users can further explore and analyse the reports, modify them, and republish them to the portal. These dynamic reports serve as the foundation for analytic collaboration, a process that allows users across an organisation, no matter where they are physically located, to share insight and to participate in the decision-making process."
Cognos also announced that Cognos Query (http://www.cognos.comlpress/cqbackground.html), a new version of the Cognos Web-based, ad hoc query and reporting component that extends Cognos enterprise BI solutions for e-business, will be ready for customer testing this month. Cognos Query provides organisations advanced, Web-based ad hoc SQL query capabilities. Cognos Query provides query services for the entire Cognos solution for e-business enabling users to navigate from summary level information to transactional details via a Web browser. Cognos Query supports enterprise BI including business performance management by providing an interactive and dynamic view of e-business, transaction-level, and detailed data.
As with PowerPlay 6.6, Cognos Query is fully integrated with the Cognos enterprise BI solution taking full advantage of a common security model, a common meta data model as well as integration with the Cognos BI portal.
From a Web browser, users access information stored in data marts and data warehouses through the Cognos Query server. This model means organisations do not need to spend time and money to deploy desktop software and train employees how to use it. The server model is well suited to large, enterprise-wide or business-to-business deployments of business intelligence where easy administration and maintenance helps reduce cost-of-ownership and increase the value of the application to the e-business.
"With the delivery of these components, Cognos completes its infrastructure for enterprise BI on the Web," said Rob Rose, Cognos vice president of product marketing. "We are giving our customers the most effective tool set for taking advantage of the new e-business opportunity: the benefits of all the capabilities of BI in a single, unified, end-to-end solution-the widest range of reporting and analysis, delivered through a true BI portal and managed from a single point of administration. Only Cognos has this fully integrated enterprise-wide BI solution built for the Web."
Both Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos Query ship with the BI portal, security and meta data services. Cognos PowerPlay 6.6 will be generally available at the end of January 2000. Cognos Query is in customer testing now and scheduled to be generally available at the end of February 2000. For more detailed information about Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos Query, please refer to our Web site at. PowerPlay: http://www.cognos.com/powerp1ay/new.html and Cognos Query: http://www.cognos.com/press/ccibackground.htm1
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Cognos
Cognos is the leading vendor of enterprise business intelligence solutions. Business Intelligence software makes corporate data easily accessible to everyone in an organisation, so they can better co-ordinate decision-making across the entire enterprise, and improve the performance of the business. Cognos products are available directly from Cognos and through an extensive network of channel partners. The Company also develops, markets and supports software tools for application development.
Founded in 1969, Cognos is a publicly traded company with offices around the world and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.