Cognos first BI vendor to deliver comprehensive framework for CPM

Business intelligence (BI) solutions company, Cognos, has announced its position as the first vendor to deliver a comprehensive framework for corporate performance management (CPM).

"Cognos has embraced CPM as the future of the BI arena," says Tharina van der Merwe, channel and marketing manager of Cognos SA. "Organisations use CPM to align business strategy with execution across the enterprise. Cognos BI fulfils the promise of CPM by enabling the entire management cycle - planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis and scorecarding.

"CPM represents the natural evolution of enterprise-scale business intelligence implementations," she says.

Market research firm Gartner defines CPM as the methodologies, metrics, processes, and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise. In a recent report, Gartner stated that CPM is an important concept, as it represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence solutions.

Adds Van der Merwe: "While other BI vendors offer point solutions which address isolated elements of corporate performance management, Cognos` BI solution is comprehensive enough to enable an organisation to fulfil its entire CPM strategy over the long-term."

Specifically, Cognos enables effective CPM by:

• .         Enabling strategy-led planning and budgeting;

• .         Aligning individual metrics to overall strategy through the creation and management of key performance indicators;

• .         Making information within existing ERP, data warehouse, and other operational systems strategically valuable to the organisation through robust reporting and analysis;

• .         Empowering everyone in a company to participate in elevating business performance through broad scalability to users inside and outside the enterprise;

• .         Driving co-ordinated and collaborative decision-making by ensuring consistent information is shared across the enterprise in formats suited to individual business needs and objectives;

• .         Delivering a consistent view of the organisation across functions and processes through the consolidation and transformation of data from disparate sources; and

• .         Allowing timely, informed action at the point of impact through the identification of trends or events affecting performance.

"We believe enterprises will start to embrace CPM in 2002, combining BI infrastructure and applications," says Nigel Rayner, Research Director at Gartner. "Enterprises that effectively deploy CPM solutions will outperform their industry peers."

Cognos recently strengthened its ability to help customers enable their enterprises for CPM when the company announced that it had been selected as a global vendor to provide core BI tools for PwC Consulting`s iAnalytics solution. This partnership combines PwC Consulting`s extensive expertise and experience in applied business analytics with Cognos` BI capabilities. The end result is a solution that enables people throughout the enterprise to plan, budget, measure, analyse, and report on performance in support of the company`s entire management cycle.

"Our clients are constantly trying to gain a competitive edge by enhancing their information strategies. Increasingly, CPM is that next level to which our clients are striving - transforming corporate strategy into enterprise effectiveness," says Mike Schroeck, Global iAnalytics leader, PwC Consulting. "We partner with Cognos because we believe they have the vision, expertise, and proven track record to help the world`s largest organisations elevate business performance to new heights."

"BI is quickly becoming a strategic imperative for organisations seeking to connect people to the goals of the business," says Ron Zambonini, president and CEO of Cognos. "As enterprises around the world work to improve CPM, Cognos will continue direct our products, support, and services toward helping our customers deliver on that promise," he concludes.