Forrester ranks Cognos as leader in new analyst report

Cognos has been ranked as a leader in Forrester Research`s "Grading BI Reporting and Analysis Solutions" market evaluation.

The results of the Forrester evaluation, with Cognos earning leader rankings in all scenarios - analytic reporting, enterprise reporting, business reporting, and consolidated platform reporting - illustrates that Cognos has once again performed well against the competition and solidified its position as a front-runner in the business intelligence market.

The Forrester report, which evaluated 13 vendors using Forrester`s Wave methodology, assesses them across three major elements: current offering, strategy and market presence.

Using four scenarios, Forrester assigned weightings to suit each scenario to help prospective buyers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the vendor offerings for each. With regard to the Business Reporting scenario, Cognos was cited specifically for the business process support accorded by Cognos Metrics Manager, its scorecarding solution.

"Companies use business reporting to control the flow of data to financial and business analysts in accounts payable and receivable applications, to implement a balanced scorecard methodology, and to track performance metrics," says Keith Gile, senior analyst, Forrester Research.

He adds: "Few vendors offer a strong business process mechanism in BI - although Cognos is leading the way with Metrics Manager."

Cognos continues to expand its leadership position in BI on the strength of its Cognos Enterprise BI Series, and delivering on its vision of corporate performance management (CPM).

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The Cognos EBI Series offers customers rich data visualisation and dashboards, managed reporting, powerful analysis, advanced ad hoc query, actionable event-driven BI, and data integration.

Combined with Cognos Enterprise Planning Series, its solution for planning, budgeting, modelling and forecasting, and Cognos Metrics Manager, its enterprise scorecarding solution, Cognos delivers a complete and integrated solution for CPM.

Cognos scales to hundreds of thousands of users, and currently is the standard for many companies.

According to the Forrester Research report, reporting and analysis are necessities, and no longer luxuries.

The report adds that the "opportunity to build reports and perform analysis on any type of data is no longer a luxury available only to those with deep pockets. On the contrary, every bit of data, both structured and unstructured, can be used to help companies and governmental organisations understand how to better serve customers, build new products and services, and improve all aspects of the business."

It adds: "Companies will save money by standardising on fewer reporting and analysis solutions, ideally adopting a single standard for each reporting category."

Karen Williams, Cognos VP of Business Intelligence Product Marketing, says: "Forrester`s report is further validation that standardising on a single BI solution helps customers reduce cost and complexity - while increasing responsiveness to business changes."