Cognos has a full range of products aimed at all aspects of CPM and Business Intelligence.
Industry News: IBM has completed the acquisition of Cognos. Read what IBM have to say about the acquisition and opinions from people in the industry when the intention was announced in November.
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Cognos has recently consolidated its ReportNet, PowerPlay and Transformer products into an integrated offering in Series 8 although the former technologies still reside underneath. This gives a single source for reporting and analysis with a common metadata layer, all of which is delivered as a scalable, web-deployable tool.
ReportNet addresses production reporting, ad hoc queries, scorecards and dashboards. Reports can be scheduled for batch production but its real advantage is its self-serving nature. The intuitive point and click interface allows users to build reports by dragging data and structure elements on to a blank report. Data access is controlled as indeed is the level of functionality given to users. This allows all users in the organization to be catered for appropriately.
PowerPlay is the analytical tool which explores dimensionally structured data with drill down, slice and dice, ranking/sorting, zero suppression and top/bottom values. It can nest dimensions and generate derivative data using calculations and rounding.
Transformer is the data modeling tool that is used behind the scenes to build the objects and cubes that are ultimately visible to the reporting tools.
For more information on Cognos Series 8 contact us.
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In the area of planning, budgeting and forecasting, Cognos Planning provides a functionally rich and mature offering which includes integration with Microsoft Excel.
The web application, Contributor, offers both client side and server-side processing but the key feature is that the user downloads a planning model via the web that runs on the local user’s machine. Consequently, there is no delay in sending information to and from the server in order to have simple calculations executed as these are performed by the local machine.
Individual applications can be designed to be used by specific functions eg cost centres or marketing or sales. Each can consist of multiple grids and cubes that can process data such as passing it to other cubes in the application and other applications.
Contributor has work flow, an auditing capability and can be extended to thousands of users. The application also allows for the capture of text both as a cell entry and a cell annotation. Individual applications are relatively non-technical to develop and hence can be largely maintained and developed by non-IT staff.
Cognos Planning has sophisticated calculation functionality with its Built in Functions of particular note. These generally make reference to the time dimension such that closing balances become opening balances automatically even after changing the time dimension itself. Other examples include NPV, lagged variables and even Erlang calculations for call centre management.
The client server version, Analyst, allows large single models to be built and these can be linked to user friendly flow charts. Data can also be passed from such models to the Contributor.
For more information on Cognos Planning contact us.