Cognos' Don Campbell. (Photo supplied)

Cognos is raising the profile and expanding the reach of its new Go! Search service by integrating it into business software offerings from two of the most-recognized names in technology.

Go! Search works with Cognos 8 BI, and will be integrated into IBM's enterprise search software and Google's new OneBox, a similar corporate intelligence search engine.

Cognos Go! will allow reports, analyses, dashboards, metric information, and events to be published and indexed by OmniFind, the IBM enterprise search platform. In the Google framework, a search will produce a series of familiar Google-style links to corporate data and reports, as well as charts and graphs to accompany the result.

Cognos believes adding search capabilities to BI software is the next paradigm for business intelligence products.

"It's the way business intelligence information will be accessed by a great deal of the population going forward," Don Campbell, Cognos vice-president of platform strategy and technology, said in an interview.

Whereas business intelligence now has only about a 20 per cent adoption rate, Mr. Campbell says adding the ability to search corporate records and documents will create "BI for the masses." Authorized users will be able to find detailed corporate data appropriate to their role within the company as easily as they can now find the stock price.

"By delivering relevant data enhanced by access to new types of information, Cognos and IBM are delivering solutions to help customers find the right information at the right time, no matter where it resides," Jon Prial, IBM's vice-president of content management and discovery, said in a statement.

"Google and Cognos can help companies enhance the value of their BI deployments by making full report content, from financial to operational reports, searchable by anyone in the organization," says Rob Rose, chief strategy officer at Cognos

A retailer, for example, could search for sales reports on a specific product in a specific region and get a detailed "pre-filtered" report responding exactly to their search request, says Mr. Campbell.

For Cognos, there is the added cachet of associating with IBM and Google, and exposing its business intelligence products to an even wider audience.

"It only helps to solidify the vision of business intelligence to be linked with these names," he says.