Cognos- The Best BI and Performance Management Products of IBM

Cognos was an Ottawa, Ontario based company which was into developing the Business Management (BI) and Performance Management (PM) software suite. IBM took over Cognos in January 2008 which comprises of three dozen software suites approximately and is built on open standards. Cognos is used by multiple vendors like Microsoft, NCR Teradata, SAP, Oracle etc. with both relational and multidimensional data sources.

The Cognos 8 BI suite continues to the most sought after performance management software. It includes features like reporting, dashboards, analysis and scorecard and is delivered through SOA- which is a web based service oriented architecture. This software suite aims at assisting business users to extract business data, analyze the data and generate reports. This doesn’t require much technical knowledge to perform the actions.

 The Cognos 10 integrates Cognos with all other IBM applications. It is more power packed with mobile capability and can easily be connected to SPSS Predictive Analytics and Lotus Connect.

IBM’ s Cognos Express caters to small or medium-sized companies which helps with planning phase, budgeting phase and forecasting phase of an enterprise.

IBM poses a neck-to-neck competition to Oracle by offering wide range of software suites which are used by nearly 23,000 companies globally. ‘Gartner Magic Quadrants for Business Intelligence’ is marking IBM as one of the leaders in IT industry consistently.

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

This is a web-based integrated BI suite which provides set of tools for analysis, reporting, dashboards, scorecards and monitoring. The software suite constitutes different components which cater to different requirements.

Basic components of Cognos BI are as follows:

• Cognos Connection- A web portal which is the basic suite to perform browser actions and to get access to all other functions or content in the suite. The functions include creating tasks, administering, access permissions, managing, structuring and displaying whereas the content include reports, scorecards, etc.

• Query Studio- This assists with simple business queries and to get customized self-service reports. The data can be easily pulled, filtered, sorted or formatted according to the need. Even data diagrams can be easily created using the suite.

• Report Studio- This suite is used to create management reports which have two modes- the professional authoring mode and Express authoring mode. Both of these offer different range of permissions to access the organization data. Even the user interface functionality differs in both the modes.

• Analysis Studio- It supports analyzing large data and to search for the information on a particular event or action. It offers features like multidimensional analysis with drag-and-drop features and key performance indicators or OLAP functionalities.

• Event Studio- This is a notification tool that notifies the user about the events or meetings within an organization on a day-to day basis. The message can be created by the owner of the business event or meeting and the notification maybe triggered through an e-mail or by triggering reports.

• Workspace- This is a web-interface which allows the users to use the IBM Cognos content and in turn build their own customized workspaces for insight and collaboration.

• Workspace Advanced- This is a suite which allows business users to create, author or analyze reports or information.

Additional Components of Cognos BI

Other Products of IBM Cognos

IBM Cognos Express

IBM Cognos Express is an integrated Business Intelligence suite and planning solution suite which was launched in September 2009. The suite was built to cater the needs of mid-sized companies. Below are the features of Cognos Express:

• The Self-service reporting and ad hoc query suite called Cognos Express Reporter

• The Freeform analysis and visualization suite called Cognos Express Advisor

• A TM1-based business planning and analysis suite which has integration with Microsoft Excel and web interfaces called Cognos Express Xcelerator

The IBM Cognos also offers numerous application development tools like:

• IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL

• IBM Cognos Axiant 4GL

• IBM Cognos PowerHouse Web

IBM Cognos has won number of awards like eWEEK Excellence Award, the LOTUS ADVISOR "Editor's Choice" Award, TechTarget's SearchCRM.com 2005 Product of the Year and so on.