Cognos has topped the billion-dollar revenue mark with PowerPlay, its online analytical processing (OLAP) solution, and is now leading the field in business intelligence, according to the OLAP Survey 3 report.
The report, by independent industry analyst Nigel Pendse, sampled more than 1 000 sites during 2003 and concluded that Cognos PowerPlay is the leading OLAP solution in the market.
The survey cited Cognos as the only OLAP solution to be in the top two in all of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Teradata database environments. The survey also indicated that PowerPlay users had some of the highest future buying intentions, and that it ranked substantially higher than its competitors in overall user loyalty. Among general-purpose OLAP tools, PowerPlay has higher overall usage rates than other business intelligence companies.
"With the international OLAP market valued at $3.5 billion within the broader business intelligence field, leading analysts such as Gartner, Meta Group and IDC rate us as the overall leader in this sector," says Cognos SA MD David McWilliam. "PowerPlay allows users to deploy to thousands of users from any OLAP architecture. Customers rely on the solution to perform multi-dimensional analysis, create reports, and share these reports enterprise-wide to improve decision-making. It is one of the most flexible deployment architectures available on the market."
Forrester Research notes that OLAP has evolved into a vital and irreplaceable component of business intelligence applications.
The research firm says OLAP`s transformation represents a corporate shift away from business operations and the related data transactions that are generated by enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and financial systems. Today firms focus on business imperatives and the requisite information analysis inherent in performance measurements.
Global companies such as Deltek, a leading provider of enterprise resource planning solutions for project-based businesses and professional services firms, and AAA Travel have effectively deployed PowerPlay to analyse massive volumes of data with sub-second response times.
AAA Travel, one of the major business lines of AAA internationally, deployed an extranet business intelligence solution from Cognos to consolidate, analyse and report on critical business data collected from more than 1 000 retail travel locations throughout the US and Canada.
"We use Cognos PowerPlay to give our users an easy way to tap into critical data from the company`s many data sources," says Glen MacDonell, data management and analysis manager at AAA. "Cognos PowerPlay is the cornerstone of our business intelligence infrastructure."
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Cognos South Africa is the local subsidiary of Canadian-based Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and performance planning software for the enterprise. Companies use Cognos solutions to improve and direct corporate performance. From planning and budgeting, to measuring and monitoring performance, to reporting and analysis, Cognos is the only company to support all of these key management activities with a complete solution that spans all of the essential components of enterprise planning, scorecarding, and business intelligence.
More than 22 000 customers in over 135 countries use Cognos to better monitor, understand and drive the successful performance of their business. Cognos customers represent every industry sector including automotive, banking and insurance, energy and natural resources, government, healthcare, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.
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