Cognos unveils BI update ahead of IBM deal

Business intelligence (BI) vendor Cognos has updated its flagship platform, offering what is likely to be its last major refresh before it is subsumed into IBM.

Cognos 8.3, which was launched earlier this week, combines the vendor's BI tools with other Cognos planning and consolidation products. It also adds new capabilities to deliver more targeted information to a broader range of users and to support Microsoft Excel-based exploration and analysis, according to the vendor.

Ovum analyst Helena Schwenk highlighted new threshold tools, which can be set to monitor system metrics, and an upgrade manager allowing result comparisons between two parallel environments, as being particularly useful updates for administrators. In addition, a “snapshot of system health” will give administrators a consolidated view of the data they need to assess system status, she added.

However, Schwenk pointed out that the update does not incorporate all of Cognos’ tools, adding that until the remaining products are integrated with the platform, it remains unclear how Cognos’ product portfolio will fit with IBM's.

“In particular, PowerPlay 7, the company’s well established and legacy OLAP [online analytical processing] tool, has yet to fully transition to Cognos 8, although the cube building product - Transformer – has now moved,” Schwenk said. “The reason for Cognos’ decision not to incorporate this legacy tool is because its move to service-oriented architecture (SOA) would have required a large amount of re-engineering work. Cognos is a conservative company and would not rush into moving one of its most respected products to a new platform if there was risk of not getting it 100 per cent right.”

Technology from Applix, which was acquired by Cognos last year, was also not integrated onto the new platform.

Nigel Rayner, Gartner research vice president, said "from the CPM perspective, 8.3 makes overall improvements to the capabilities that Cognos has, especially the Express Authoring mode, which delivers business-user oriented reporting".

He added that while the company had improved integration between Cognos Planning and the underlying Cognos BI Platform, "the Cognos Controller financial consolidation solution is not yet as tightly integrated as Planning".