Jump to:

• Executive quote
• Customer quote
• Technical specification
• About the company
• Contact details

 

Subscribe to RSS

 

Email this story to a friend

Main News Desk

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, has unveiled Cognos 8 v3 which provides customers with critical performance management components required to accelerate improved business performance.

“With compression in order lead times, manufacturing and supply chain cycle times, time to market, and product lifecycle, business success increasingly depends on timely decision-making based on operational and financial performance,” said John Hagerty, AMR Research. “Pervasive PM [performance management] is a journey that organisations can and should embark on now to empower timely, comprehensive decision making and insight into the effect these decisions have across the ecosystem of the organisation.”

Backed by Cognos partners, Cognos 8 v3 helps customers accelerate their progress towards pervasive performance management and improved decision-making. It consists of:

New, richer BI and financial performance management user capabilities to deliver more targeted information to more user roles. These are led by Cognos’ flagship business intelligence solution, Cognos 8 BI v3, unveiled today.
Core advances in the Cognos 8 enterprise-class platform to simplify management and deployment.
These enhanced user capabilities and the advances in the Cognos 8 platform are supported by new best-practice solutions and updated consulting, training and support offerings.

Joining Cognos 8 BI v3 are a full range of companion performance management capabilities for enterprise planning, forecasting and budgeting, Microsoft Excel-based exploration and analysis, and consumer modes that let users interact with BI content using familiar applications or devices, such as a BlackBerry, enterprise search engine, Microsoft Office application or Web browser. These performance management capabilities have all been optimised to leverage the Cognos 8 v3 platform and help technology, finance, line-of-business and executives drive informed, consistent decision-making across organisations.

To further accelerate customer success, Cognos has also introduced new best-practice solutions and updated consulting, training and support offerings. The updated Cognos Controller financial consolidation solution includes process enhancements to intercompany adjustments, additional GL audit, reporting and security capabilities and support for simplified Chinese. The Retail Financial Workbench and Public Sector Position Planning performance solutions introduced this week expand Cognos’ portfolio of Performance Blueprints and Powered by Cognos Solutions to over 135 targeted offerings.

A new role-based training curriculum focuses the content and learning experience on what students need to learn to effectively perform their specific roles. New Guardian Services work packages are now available to address the new features and functionality in Cognos 8 v3. Migration and upgrade utilities and services, roadmaps for the Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology, offshore services from the Global Delivery Centre, a new online customer resource centre and an expanded range of proven practices to help with specific configurations have also been introduced to help customers successfully accelerate their performance management deployments with Cognos 8 v3.

“Our use of Cognos performance management solutions has started a culture shift within Bloorview. We are moving from data dispute to shared understanding and from gut reaction to fact-based decision-making,” said Hakim Lakhani, Director, Decision Support and Planning, Bloorview Kids Rehab. “The underlying platform connects all of the performance management user capabilities together into a comprehensive system where managers can access and build reports, analyse data cubes and view key company metrics with the confidence that information is consistent and trusted.”

“Cognos continues to develop and deliver innovative performance management offerings designed to meet the real-world needs of the enterprise or mid-market organisation,” said Rob Ashe, CEO, Cognos. “This continued innovative evolution of our performance management system provides our customers with an unparalleled portfolio for turning data into actionable performance information to improve financial and operational visibility and overall business performance.”

*AMR Research, “Pervasive Performance Management: What it is and how to prepare,” by David Kasabian and John Hagerty, July 2007.

Executive quote

“Cognos continues to develop and deliver innovative performance management offerings designed to meet the real-world needs of the enterprise or mid-market organisation,” said Rob Ashe, CEO, Cognos. “This continued innovative evolution of our performance management system provides our customers with an unparalleled portfolio for turning data into actionable performance information to improve financial and operational visibility and overall business performance.”

Customer quote

“Our use of Cognos performance management solutions has started a culture shift within Bloorview. We are moving from data dispute to shared understanding and from gut reaction to fact-based decision-making,” said Hakim Lakhani, Director, Decision Support and Planning, Bloorview Kids Rehab. “The underlying platform connects all of the performance management user capabilities together into a comprehensive system where managers can access and build reports, analyse data cubes and view key company metrics with the confidence that information is consistent and trusted.”

Technical specifications

The new user capabilities of Cognos 8 BI v3 that deliver more targeted information to more user communities include:
Express Authoring Mode: Provides a self-service, streamlined, purpose-built reporting interface for finance and business analysts to access financial and operational data sources and create financial, statement style reports. Optimised to support cross tabulations, Express Authoring gives these users the simplified environment required to easily create and publish these reports using consistent information from their enterprise BI platform.
Business Driven Modeling with New Transformer Capabilities: Provides business groups with the ability to easily create and manage their own perspectives of performance information by creating new OLAP cubes with the consistent information in their enterprise BI platform. Business analysts, for example, can use Cognos 8 BI to construct smaller, faster data sets of very specific, relevant line of business performance information for more targeted exploration, analysis and faster decision-making. This capability satisfies the unique requirements of line of business workers while leveraging existing IT investments and retaining IT oversight on all user community information.
Scorecard Portlets: Through Cognos Connection, the BI portal-based dashboard, business users and executives can now save time by accessing all of their organisation’s relevant strategy management, scorecard information and diagrams in one comprehensive, at-a-glance view. This capability helps organisations efficiently provide more visibility into company strategy to ensure cross-functional alignment through execution.
Briefing Books: Briefing books help busy IT administrators or line of business users address special requests from senior management for a comprehensive view of performance information. Professional authors can combine different styles and formats within a single report, making it easy for executives to navigate and print multi-style, multi-page reports that contain related, critical business information.
Self-service Personal Alerts: Business users can create their own timely personalised alerts for scheduled reports, controlling when and how they receive critical performance information relevant to their specific area of responsibility. This capability personalises and streamlines the reporting experience for end users and frees IT from having to deliver specialised reports on demand.

Core Platform Advances
Underpinning this broad set of BI user capabilities are core advances in the Cognos 8 open, enterprise-class platform. Proven best practices are built directly into the modeling environment, helping data modelers more efficiently deliver performance information to the business. As well, the central, web-based administration capabilities now provide a more holistic view of the overall system activities and their status, enabling Cognos 8 BI administrators to more easily and proactively manage and maintain their deployments. With a metrics-driven management approach, administrators can meet their business Service Level Agreements, as their user communities grow.

New components of the Cognos 8 enterprise-class platform that ease deployment and management include:
Model Advisor: Lets novice or advanced data modelers reduce the time and effort required to build high-quality models for delivering timely information to the business. They can leverage Cognos modeling best-practices to guide the model development from initial design or diagnose issues in the model where improvements can be made.
Snapshot of System Health: A key enterprise management capability that gives administrators a single, consolidated view into all the information they need to quickly understand the status of the entire system environment. They can address potential problem areas before they become issues for end users and easily monitor all BI deployments to quickly obtain status of all servers, server groups, dispatchers, and services. Metrics can also be exposed to systems such as IBM Tivoli to tie into overall enterprise application monitoring activities.
Proactive Administration: Administrators can now view any number of system metrics and set thresholds to monitor them. With the thresholds, administrators can be alerted when a metric is starting to trend down or up and requires attention. These capabilities ease the burden on administrators as deployments scale and system complexity increases, ensuring they are able to exceed service level agreements with the business by addressing issues before they impact users. Priority can be given to critical processes to ensure consistent service delivery.
Upgrade Manager: This feature helps IT administrators improve responsiveness to the business by streamlining the process of introducing technology changes such as upgrades or system changes. It provides the means to test, compare and summarise report results between two parallel environments. This reduces the cost and effort associated with upgrading to new capabilities or switching to the latest version of a database.

For a more detailed summary of what is new in Cognos 8 BI v3 visit specific issue papers on delivering targeted information , supporting more user communities and deployment and management.

About the company

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organisation’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com .

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

Contact details

Steve George or Tulna Shah at LEWIS
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7802 2626
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7802 2627
cognos@lewispr.com
Internet: http://www.lewispr.com

---

Technorati tags: Cognos | business intelligence | performance management | product | 8.3 | updates | BI | reporting |

Bookmarklets: