Cognos, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management software delivery, has launched Cognos ReportNet worldwide. The new application promises to set the standard for Web-based enterprise query and reporting and fulfil all the reporting needs of any company.
ReportNet offers a Web-based report and query authoring environment, extensive multilingual support and Web services-based architecture to meet the needs of today`s multinational, diversified organisations and reduce total cost of ownership.
David McWilliam, MD of Cognos South Africa, says: "Cognos ReportNet offers unparalleled enterprise reporting coverage, openness and flexibility. Designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, Cognos ReportNet draws on Cognos`s query and reporting leadership, delivering a revolution in reporting."
Cognos three years ago recognised the need for one tool that could meet all the reporting needs of a company, says McWilliam, from sophisticated management reports for a select few in the organisation, down to production reports distributed among many users.
The decision to develop such a product was "risky and expensive", but Cognos realised that reporting systems could not evolve from where they had come from to where they needed to go to meet the increased demands of users, so ReportNet is "revolutionary rather than evolutionary", says McWilliam.
"Sometimes such a long development lead time can be the kiss of death, but we have seen significant consolidation happening among companies trying to achieve a similar result to ours, so the timing - as it turns out - was perfect."
An Ovum report on consolidation in the BI market corroborates McWilliam`s thoughts. It says: "These moves are part of a necessary repositioning towards vendors being able to offer a complete BI solution. In a world in which all the key BI players offer an end-to-end solution, it will be those that can do this most coherently and seamlessly that will take overall leadership."
McWilliam says the tool was built to meet three key requirements of the marketplace:
* Functionality: The needs of reporting tools have grown out of all proportion and outscaled the ability of products to meet those needs. "ReportNet has hugely improved functionality across all reporting requirements," says McWilliam.
* Convergence: There was a need for one tool that could satisfy all reporting requirements - whether that is building an annual report or creating simple reports reaching thousands of people. "At the moment clients have to buy different tools from different vendors to meet all their needs," says McWilliam. In addition, the market required convergence and integration between reporting tools and other BI components, so they could move from the reporting function into an OLAP analysis automatically, for example.
* Simply deploying previous tools across the Web was not sufficient, says McWilliam. "It is no good trying to retro-fit a tool to the Web, as it does not comply with the latest standards and offer the required speed and scalability."
Dave Folger, VP, Web and Collaboration Strategies (WCS), META Group, says: "Cognos`s new ReportNet could set the standard for Web-based ad hoc query and end-user reporting. The pressure will be on competitors."
Giga, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, in its report, "Cognos`s ReportNet: A Radical Departure in Reporting Architecture, Licensing and Direction", gives the product a long-term advantage over competitors. The reasons are the solution`s focus on scalability, broad enterprise deployment, native integration with the company`s entire product portfolio and open standards (SOAP and Web services) approach.
Mark Smith, CEO and senior VP of research at Ventana Research, adds: "Cognos ReportNet is a major breakthrough for BI and reporting convergence. It brings a completely new level of simplicity in the design and use of reporting and analysis for large sets of users with varying needs."
ReportNet is an integral part of the Cognos Enterprise BI solution, including flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful OLAP analysis, event detection and alerting, and data integration.
ReportNet delivers:
* Fast time to results.
* A range of reporting requirements.
* Multilingual support.
* Ability to leverage existing infrastructure.
* Global deployment.
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