Cognos - Gold Award for BI Software

Analytics and business intelligence BI Software

GOLD AWARD: Cognos Inc--Cognos Now! version 4.3

Even after an active year in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market, the Cognos Now! remained at the top of the pack in innovation, according to our judges. Last year, the appliance was called "Celequest Lava" -- and won SearchDataManagement.com's top Product of the Year Honors. Celequest was then purchased by Cognos in early 2007. Cognos went on to optimize, rename and release the family of plug-and-play operational business intelligence and performance management products in May 2007. The Cognos Now! products are available as appliances or hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) models -- designed for accelerated implementations, minimal IT intervention and a low total cost of ownership.

One organization using the appliance delivered executive dashboards in under a year -- and experts predict operational BI deployments to grow in the next year.

Our judges were impressed at the multi-functional appliance, shipped as a single box with many integrated functions, including:

• A unique "streaming server" with a patent-pending 64-bit memory-based streaming data store for continuous data integration and engines for multi-dimensional analysis, dynamic modeling, business-rules execution, and exception and alert reporting. It monitors business rules and alerts and allows users to drill down from any dashboard to perform root-cause analysis. The data flow engine also maintains and caches "temporal data sets" for time series analysis.
• Operational dashboards with an intuitive interface for customizing metrics, setting alerts and drilling into data.
• Data integration functions for aggregating and correlating data from multiple operational systems, transactional applications, data warehouses, databases, messaging busses and other data sources for a real-time data integration platform.
• A scalable product architecture that enables support for any number of user licenses, data sources, and dashboards.
• An application workbench, so system administrators can set up data integration, analytic models and end-user dashboards to present current information, historical data or aggregated views.
• Data-level security so end-users can only view metric data that is relevant for their job.
• Compliance with service-oriented architecture standards, allowing plug-and-play installation and interoperability with existing application and BI infrastructures, such as Cognos 8 BI.

Cognos Now! pricing starts at $49 per user per month. Learn more about Cognos Now here on the Cognos Web site.

Source: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com