Cognos and IBM have struck an alliance that will see the two companies integrate their solutions and technologies to solve the infrastructure and business issues of enterprise customers.
For IBM partners, well-developed entry points exist in key joint markets, namely the financial services, retail, public sector, healthcare and life sciences segments.
"Synergising the development, marketing and sales of our service-oriented architecture (SOA) based solutions - notably Cognos' latest BI offering, Cognos 8 Special Edition and IBM's WebSphere business integration middleware and information management (IM) technologies - will assist our customers to optimise the analytics capabilities of their respective solutions," says Gerrardt le Roux, Systems Integration Alliances Manager at Cognos South Africa.
"IBM is Cognos' reference architecture and we rely on IBM for breadth and depth of data access - also known as the 'gold standard' in the industry. We will further enhance our BI solutions for IBM hardware, software and services, moving our customers closer to attaining the ideal of a cohesive ICT framework that integrates systems, applications and processes across the enterprise."
IBM partners will find opportunities where IBM hardware and software are being considered. From a technology perspective, IBM partners can target customers whose ICT architecture included any combination of DB2, WebSphere, WebShere portal, IBM Application Server and Information Integrator, or industry vertical specific solutions such as IBM's Retail Business Intelligence Solution.
Cross-industry entry points exist where BI enterprise standardisation and human capital management are high on the agenda. "BI standardisation would require BI migration and conversion, the establishment of a competency centre and, possibly, global delivery," says le Roux. "For human capital management, a key solution area would be meeting requirements around workforce management, such as access to high level analytics to identify key workforce drivers."
The two vendors will jointly address their clients' business and technology problems, providing proof points for new engagements. Typical solutions for different industry segments include:
* Financial services: Risk management solutions.
* Insurance: The implementation or enhancement of an insurance information warehouse.
* Retail: Market basket analysis.
* Public Sector: A crime information warehouse for reporting and analysis as deployed by the New York Police Department.
* Healthcare: A performance management solution to enable cost/quality assessments.
* Life Sciences: Meeting regulatory report requirements, such as physician aggregate spend.
"Harnessing best practice and technologies developed to work in tandem offers significant benefits to our customers," reiterates le Roux. "Companies will be able to integrate their business processes across the enterprise, gain greater insights into business issues and boost their performance through the seamless integration of the business presentation and intelligence layer. In addition, customers can leverage their existing ICT assets, lower costs and provide flexibility regarding their choice of operating environments, including Linux."
These combined efforts deliver a low total cost of ownership with regards to installation, maintenance and deployment of solutions. It also offers investment protection, as both vendors will pay significant attention to each others' developments.
To better equip Cognos and IBM solution partners who wish to assist their clients to exploit the benefits offered by the new alliance, Cognos SA is currently setting up a skills matrix of available skills and training courses. IBM, meanwhile, will increase its Cognos consultant capabilities with a dedicated team known as One IBM (IBM US) that will support joint activities and solutions.
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