Rob Ashe, Cognos CEO

Cognos takes a giant step forward this week, with the introduction of what the company calls "the most significant product" it has ever released.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence will be officially launched Wednesday. CEO Rob Ashe will be in New York City, where he will host a 90-minute webcast that will be simulcast to 11 cities in North America, Europe and Latin America.

It's "our biggest step toward the future," Don Campbell, vice president of product innovation and technology, told the OBJ in a pre-release briefing.

Cognos 8 BI puts the company's four main business intelligence modules – ReportNet, PowerPlay, Metrics Manager and DecisionStream – together in one package for the first time.

"It's the natural evolution of these four products," says Michael Smith, senior manager of product marketing.

Cognos designed the new package to address several "pain points" identified during customer feedback sessions, including multiple users within a company with different needs, multiple sources of corporate data, and multiple business intelligence technologies.

Cognos 8 will operate from a single Web-based architecture, offering access to all users through a browser. At the same time, enhanced security procedures mean individuals only have access to the data and information that relates to their role in the company.

End users will see a highly visual and graphical representation of corporate data laid out before them. The program makes extensive use of dashboarding techniques – bar graphs, charts, and gauges that resemble a car's speedometer – to display the information.

Improved scorecarding will make it possible not only to identify emerging problems, but to initiate corrective steps.

The program's event management capabilities have also been improved. Executives can be alerted automatically to key operational or performance events, and quickly launch a response. For example, a company could automatically raise or lower its prices if a competitor changes its pricing structure by a pre-determined amount.

There is multilingual support as well. A document produced in North America will appear in Japanese when it is opened in the Tokyo office.

Cognos will target existing users as well as potential new customers who are looking to standardize their business intelligence software. By combining the four modules into a single package, Cognos believes it will also appeal to customers who are looking to deal with fewer suppliers.

"This is not a suite of loosely-coupled products," says Mr. Smith, taking a swipe at some of Cognos' competitors in the business intelligence market.

Cognos 8 BI will be widely available in November.

By Scott Evans

scott.evans@transcontinental.ca