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Cognos Launches Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), announced the worldwide launch of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, a product that provides the complete range of BI functionality on a single, proven Web Services-based architecture.

Cognos 8 BI is based on the proven and powerful Web Services-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) first introduced with Cognos ReportNet in 2003. ReportNet is the fastest-selling product in Cognos history, generating more than $235 million in license revenue through Q1FY06 and now in use by more than 2,500 customers worldwide.

Cognos 8 BI is the only solution that provides the complete range of BI capabilities in a single product, on a single architecture. It is also the only solution to deliver a simplified, zero-footprint interface for all users, authors and administrators. Easy to integrate, deploy and use, Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified BI environment that drives high user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale technology foundation for performance management, now and in the future.

In addition to simplifying the deployment of BI with a single product and architecture, Cognos 8 BI includes many enhancements to streamline the access to information for improved decision-making:

Cognos 8 BI is the first BI product to eliminate barriers to data access. Extended open data access capabilities allow the complete range of BI functionality - reporting, analysis, dashboarding, scorecarding and event management - to be performed against any organizational data, whether relational or OLAP, helping to eliminate information silos that can inhibit decision-making. While competing solutions require separate tools to view different types of data, Cognos 8 BI uniquely delivers a single metadata layer and a single query engine, providing customers with a single, trusted place for all relevant data and a complete and consistent view of any business issue or driver.

Cognos 8 BI's comprehensive reporting capabilities are suitable for business style and production and business style reports, real-time dashboards, as well as ad-hoc queries. New in Cognos 8 BI is the ability to report OLAP data and maintain dimensional awareness, enabling consumers of a report or dashboard to simply click and drill down to the right level of information required for decision-making. Also, new chart styles such as gauges and maps, as well as rich graphical formatting, enable the creation of more dynamic and high-impact reports and dashboards.

To simplify the exploration and discovery of information, Cognos 8 BI makes it easier for users to perform complex analysis, even against very large data sources. Enhancements include the ability to apply compound filters, nest subsets of information, and compare different levels of information - all with drag-and-drop ease. Now, for example, comparing the top five sales reps in the bottom five regions, across the top five products, can be done quickly and easily. Analysis can also be performed against multi-dimensionally modeled relational data in addition to OLAP data.

Based on the proven Cognos alerting capability, Cognos 8 BI offers the industry's only business event management. It automatically monitors data and alerts users in real-time of key operational or performance events - with information in context - via email or Web-based news items through the RSS channel. It eliminates the SPAM that normally occurs with first-generation alerting technology by only notifying users when there has been a change to the status of the event. With Cognos 8 BI, events can be sequenced, and through the use of Web services, events can be resolved instantly without user interaction by automatically launching business processes - even those that are part of a larger business process management (BPM) system. Cognos 8 BI supports operational business intelligence needs by managing the full lifecycle of the event, escalating actions if the event continues, and closing the loop as the event completes.

Cognos 8 BI is fully process-driven, and Cognos has joined with leading BPM vendors to enable right-time, process-aware business intelligence. This tight integration with BPM solutions makes it easy for users to access business intelligence as part of an established business process.

Scorecarding has been enhanced with advanced initiative tracking, enabling managers to monitor actions and decisions to correct and improve performance associated with a key metric. This enables decisions to be tracked over time and provides a formal corporate decision-making memory that will help users learn from the past when faced with new problems and opportunities. Users can also now get a quick feel for a metric's trend by simply moving their mouse over a metric and viewing an advanced history chart.

As part of its open data access, Cognos 8 BI capabilities can natively access Cognos Planning and Consolidation data. Using Cognos 8 BI, production reports that show budget vs. actual can be easily created, as can alerts that track budget variances and proactively notify management before any damage is done. Agents can even be created to monitor the status of plan and budget completion.

Cognos 8 BI also enables extended self-service across BI capabilities, alleviating IT resources and allowing users to work with personalized, consistent information using familiar interfaces that fit their needs and skills. For example, users can easily perform ad-hoc queries against relational or OLAP data, graphically format the result using corporate templates, and then share the report with colleagues - without ever involving skilled report authors or IT. 


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