Business intelligence (BI) solutions specialist, Synergy Computing, has secured the exclusive sub-Saharan distributorship for the Envisn suite of BI automation and productivity tools. These are helping companies worldwide reduce the administration costs of their Cognos-based BI solutions by as much as 80% or more.
The three-product suite comprises AutoVisn, a production and scheduling tool embracing performance monitoring and advanced real-time reporting; DocuVisn, which automatically documents a Cognos environment; and UniVisn, which tracks Cognos usage and performance.
"All three products streamline the process of delivering business information and make the Cognos BI products as easy to support as they are to use. Everyone that has purchased them has achieved a return on their investment in excess of 100% and a payback period measured in days or weeks versus years," says Paul Howard, director and product manager at Synergy Computing.
"Envisn's products make Cognos' world-class BI products even better. As BI implementations become more sophisticated and pervasive, such tools are going to become essential components of the overall solution. It will help companies optimise their BI environments and maximise returns."
The suite, launched last year by Envisn Information Solutions, a Cognos Premier Solutions Provider, leverages Cognos' Web-based BI tools to significantly extend the value of a BI environment by allowing companies to shift resources from monitoring production and usage to developing more valuable content for end-users.
"There's a real need in the market especially among the larger environments where administration and control becomes a complex and costly overhead that can erode the overall bottom line benefits of the BI solution," he says.
AutoVisn is the only production and scheduling tool designed to fully automate the entire Cognos environment. It enables Cognos administrators to schedule and manage jobs on multiple servers via a Web browser and to receive real-time notification of job status via e-mail or pager. It also enables them to test and execute job components before putting them into production thus ensuring a higher level of success.
AutoVisn has been successfully tested in very large, complex environments and routinely handled everything without any problem. Designed to be fully scalable, it can be used with a single server or with multiple servers in large BI deployments.
"What users like most is its ability to help them understand where they may have potential problems in their production stream before they occur. This helps ensure greater up-time and enables them to take full advantage of their production window," says Howard.
UniVisn allows Cognos BI users to fully track which users are using the tools and which reports and cubes are being accessed and the frequency of access. It captures all usage data and creates a single PowerPlay cube enabling Cognos administrators to measure the effectiveness of their BI deployment.
"The total Cognos environment can be monitored effectively and being able to establish the usage trend is critical for effective capacity planning and resource management. UniVisn is a great tool for managing license compliance and ensuring that licenses are being utilised effectively," he adds.
Knowing what users access and want is also key in enabling administrators to provide better service and support to them. It is also an effective way of getting instant feedback on development work and measuring the usefulness of this work.
DocuVisn enables Cognos users to automatically document their environment - their catalogues, Impromptu reports, PowerPlay cubes, and the Upfront Web portal. Documentation can be done concurrently with development so that it is always current.
"Documentation, if it does exist, is almost always out of date because it's a tedious, time-consuming task that nobody really wants to do. DocuVisn makes it easy to document for a single site or an entire worldwide deployment over multiple sites from a single point," says Howard.
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