The Business Intelligence Blog

Yes, all the ones whom you think about are there. No Misses. Good Going !!

Read More about each of these vendors on the story.

There are 9 vendors on the core list for 2008, same number as last year. This may surprise some people after all of the mergers and resulting consolidation of 2007. The fact is that some vendors that were not on this list before have now made it because of their acquisitions. Therefore, while the number is the same, the names of the vendors on the list have changed quite a bit. In addition, some smaller vendors that have been around for awhile have broadened their product set or customer base or both and now merit inclusion. Here now, in alphabetical order, are the core performance management vendors for 2008.

Adaptive Planning
Clarity Systems
IBM/Cognos
Infor
Longview systems
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP
SAS

Not a suprising story for a BI professional but certainly very interesting read. Good to see BI spreading to all types of businesses.

Read the story at Computer World -

Valle says Papa Gino’s began considering BI tools about two years ago. Early last year, the chain chose the Cognos 8 product line and began installing the software.

Customer satisfaction levels improve, he says, if pizza buyers are given more accurate delivery times, even if the time window they’re given is longer — maybe 30 minutes as opposed to 20. He adds that Papa Gino’s could already tell from the point-of-sale system at a restaurant what time an individual order was received, when the customer was promised delivery, when the employee making the delivery left the store and when he or she returned. But before the BI tools became available, that information was stored in spreadsheets and was hard to access.

Papa Gino’s executives now use Cognos 8 to analyse the data and look for exceptions, both positive and negative, in an effort to improve delivery-time estimates. Valle says he thinks the analysis results will help show restaurant managers how to ensure that customer expectations are set correctly, and possibly how to speed up deliveries.

After the recent acquisition of Cognos, IBM is starting to add applications to its BI suite by leveraging existing Cognos products and also new BI tools.

From Infoweek -

IBM (NYSE: IBM) last week laid out its plan to integrate the business intelligence products from recently acquired Cognos with its own information management software. To show that it means business, IBM introduced no fewer than 10 BI packages that do just that, for industries such as banking, retail, health care, and life sciences.

The strategy involves melding Cognos’ business analytics and reporting tools with IBM’s content management and database middleware. One offering, for example, adds Cognos’ Store Operations and Planning blueprints to IBM’s Retail Integration framework. Such combinations take “us deeper into business analysis and analytics,” says IBM senior VP Steve Mills.

For banking, IBM introduced the Financial Risk Insight Solution, which couples the IBM Banking Data Warehouse with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence modules. It’s meant to give financial services companies an enterprise-wide view of risk across products, divisions, and geographies.

Cognos released their Next Generation Business Intelligence suite named Cognos 8.3 last week. Its their biggest release since 2005 when Cognos 8 was released and also an eventful release since they were recently acquired by IBM. The European Commission recently signed off on IBM’s acquisition of Cognos.

Cindi Howson writes a short note on good and bad of Cognos 8.3 -

The new Personal Alerts feature has the best work flow I’ve seen for such business alerts. The Express Authoring mode is intended to better meet the needs of power users, a user segment for which the current Report Studio is too complex and Query Studio too basic. While this mode is a step in the right direction, lack of charting abilities and limitations in types of data sources (they must be dimensionally modeled) seem to introduce other holes that will force some users to revert to Report Studio.

From Washington Post -

IBM’s US$5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.

After examining the acquisition, the European Commission said in astatementthat it “would not give rise to competition concerns, since the parties’ combined market share would be moderate.”

IBM announced its intention to buy Cognos, based in Ottawa, in November, saying it hoped to combine the Cognos software with IBM’s back-end database products. They hope to close the deal by the end of March, but there are still a few regulatory requirements to be met, including the approval of Canada’s minister of industry.

From TDWI News-

The C8.3 enhancements aren’t confined to the back end. The revamped suite boasts several end-user (or user-focused) improvements, too—including a new Express Authoring mode that lets users quickly create and publish crosstabs and statement-style reports. Cognos officials say that C8.3 delivers a raft of reporting improvements—including, for example, support for horizontal pagination and improved navigation in multi-page reports. There are also a few portal improvements, including a global filtering capability, new metrics portlets, personal report subscriptions, and watch rules.

The new C8.3 reporting improvements, which are more in the line of user self-service capabilities, should get a warm reception from both business power users and the IT teams that struggle to support them.

Cgonos 8 Go! is now being talked about in the industry circle, just extended its features to Windows Mobile 6 smartphones.

From Arabian Business -

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile is the industry’s first business intelligence solution designed to make it convenient to view, consume and interact with highly relevant performance information on mobile devices. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile delivers enterprise data through an intuitive interface optimized for each different type of mobile platform. It now brings timely decision-support information directly to Windows Mobile 6 devices. All decision makers who need to access BI content across the enterprise, either through a mobile device or on the Web, are able to use the same consistent, trusted source of operational information.

Existing Cognos 8 BI customers, such as MTD Products, will be able to use their Windows Mobile 6 smartphones to further leverage their BI investments.

“We beta-tested this new version against our Windows Mobile Treo environment and saw immediate opportunity to add value by bringing BI reporting to new users across the company,” said Natalie Sabo, manager, Business Intelligence, MTD Products. “With Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, we have the capability to provide executives and sales personnel with daily sales and shipment information in a convenient, easily consumable format.”

Very recently, two of the biggest Business Intelligence product companies were bought by bigger giants. That goes on the prove, the Business Intelligence arena is gaining momentum with the increasing demand for BI/Data Mining services.

Cognos was bought by IBM yesterday and three weeks ago, Business Objects was bought by the ERP giant, SAP.

From Cognos/IBM Press release –

The acquisition of Cognos supports IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, a cross-company initiative announced on February 16, 2006 that combines IBM’s strength in information integration, content and data management and business consulting services to unlock the business value of information. Integrating Cognos, the 23rd IBM acquisition in support of its Information on Demand strategy, will enable new business insights to be delivered to a broader set of people across an organization, beyond the traditional users of business intelligence.

From BO/SAP Press release –

Together, SAP and Business Objects intend to offer high-value solutions for process- and business-oriented professionals. The solutions will be designed to enable companies to strengthen decision processes, increase customer value and create sustainable competitive advantage through real-time, multi-dimensional business intelligence. SAP and Business Objects believe that customers will gain significant business benefits through the combination of new, innovative offerings of enterprise-wide business intelligence solutions along with embedded analytics in transactional applications. Additionally, the joint partner ecosystems will be fueled by the industry’s most powerful business process platform providing customers with the best enterprise information management platform available for SAP and non-SAP environments.

Having worked extensively with both these products, Cognos and Business Objects, I have to say its a great buy for IBM and SAP respectively. For IBM, Cognos a costly but a great BI tool is an amazing bombo with Teradata. For SAP, this will be a great addition to their ERP suite and Oracle is already huge in the BI area. We have to just wait for the next move. It’s getting to interest the on-lookers of the BI industry.

Cognos is on the news currently for many reasons. One primary reason is because of it’s delinquent in its regulatory filings. But that apart it’s much ahead on its product offerings. Cognos announced that it will be offering new customer service initiatives that will help minimize time on return on investment(ROI).

“BI Standardization is critical to the success of the modern enterprise. Services play a key role in delivering this success, helping customers understand the best course of action to take, associated costs along the way, what to expect, and when,” said David Pratt, vice president of global professional services at Cognos. “Our new customer success initiatives reflect our ongoing commitment to delivering the best BI product, coupled with the right people, right processes and right knowledge, all backed by leading services that deliver true business value while mitigating risk and minimizing time to ROI.”

This will acheived by standardizing BI deployments by using tools that come along with Cognos 8 BI. Services on Audit, Estimation and implementation will help customers achieve better ROI on their BI projects.