Cognos introduces first end-to-end platform for true enterprise business intelligence solutions

Cognos, the leading strategic vendor of enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions, has released the Cognos platform, the first solution for building, managing and deploying BI solutions for enterprise and e-business needs . The Cognos end-to-end platform includes enterprise infrastructure layers that cover data mart building, integrated meta data modeling, integrated security, as well as content management and distribution through a rich BI portal environment. These layers encapsulate new editions of the Cognos Web-based BI server engines for reporting, analysis and visualization.

"The Cognos platform is a giant step forward in our quest to derive greater value from our data because it improves the quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of reporting and analysis. Cognos has expanded the value of business intelligence from a set of tools used by analysts to a strategic way to stay ahead of the competition," said Chris Tengwall, HCIA director of data warehousing and application development. HCIA helps health care professionals make sound business and clinical decisions by improving the quality and accessibility of the information they use. "Cognos understands that information is the commodity of Web-based business: consistent, timely information helps our clients better manage their resources and services. With the announcement of the Cognos platform, there is now a technology process to satisfy the methods around which we have built our business," said Tengwall.

Thousands of companies have seen definitive proof of the value of BI and now want to expand it throughout their organizations and into their e-business initiatives. The Internet infrastructure most organizations now have in place provides a solid environment for broad and cost-effective deployment, however, it doesn`t end there because these enterprises also require:

.         Scalable, centrally managed, BI-ready data infrastructure

.         BI applications that can adapt to business needs changing at the speed of the Web

.         Centralized content and data access control with an individual user experience

.         Zero-footprint Web-interfaces that can cross the enterprise barrier and be easily accessed by users inside and outside the organization.

"The Cognos platform delivers a mission-critical competitive advantage to our solid wood business because it unleashes access to information that we simply didn`t have before. We can now view leading, key performance indicators which enables us to better anticipate changes in our marketplace," said Brian Corrall, controller, solid wood division of MacMillan Bloedel. "With the announcement of the Cognos platform, the technology is now in place to help us deliver on our vision to be a fully web-based, information-driven company."

"Cognos has been consistently recognized for its market leading and best-of-breed OLAP and SQL reporting products. Recently we`ve expanded the market`s view of Business Intelligence through our introduction of BI-ready data mart creation and advanced data visualization capabilities. With this announcement, we are giving our customers the benefits of all of these BI capabilities 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," said Terry Hall, Cognos chief operating officer. "This platform embodies what many decision support software vendors failed to achieve so far-a fully integrated foundation for enterprise-wide business intelligence solutions."

The Cognos platform for enterprise BI solutions addresses the full range of customer needs from proactive 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 visualizations and business performance management reports. This is delivered from a unifying foundation on which businesses can extract value from corporate data and deliver it in a consistent way within the enterprise and beyond to customers and suppliers using the Internet.

Cognos Platform

The Cognos platform is a complete foundation for building BI solutions designed to meet the challenges of enterprise and e-business deployments. The platform includes five integrated service layers:

.         Portal Services provide a single point of personalized access to BI and non-BI content to users and a single point of delivery and management of this content to IT.

.         Enterprise BI Services include enterprise scalable BI servers (UNIX and NT). These services contain the market-leading BI servers: PowerPlay (Analysis), and Impromptu (Reporting) as well as new Cognos servers: Cognos Query (Query) and Cognos Visualizer (Visualization).

.         Meta Data Services provide a central place to create and manage business intelligence meta data and business rules. Using Meta Data Services, a single meta data model can be created that spans all enterprise data sources and all enterprise BI applications, thereby, ensuring consistency and accuracy of information across the enterprise.

.         BI Data Mart Creation Services encompasses BI mart modeling, transformation, and creation that supports shared, conformed cross-enterprise dimensions.

.         Common Security Services enables IT to manage and maintain users and user classes for all Cognos products. With this common security layers users will only need to log in to the platform once.

Only Cognos delivers a superior, end-to-end, technology foundation-based on customer requirements-for scaleable, enterprise BI. For further information on the Cognos platform please view the following background document: www.cognos.com/whatsnew/platformbg.html