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

South African Companies Select Progress EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence BI News : South African Companies Select Progress EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence

Progress Software announced today that four South African companies -- Nedbank, Europ Assistance, Matrix Vehicle Tracking and Integrated Healthcare Distribution -- selected Progress EasyAsk software for Operational Business Intelligence to enhance their business users’ ability to quickly and easily access critical business data that can help them in their day-to-day decision-making.

Companies use Business Intelligence tools to access the data they need to help them make business decisions. Traditional Business Intelligence tools often provide only a small subset of executives and business analysts with access to this data, resulting in more than 80% of employees without a path to insight that could improve their business. Conversely, the goal of Operational Business Intelligence is to provide all employees that need to access the data with easy and timely access to the information that they deem most useful.

EasyAsk for Operational BI is the industry’s first data retrieval solution designed for use by all business users, and not just power users and analysts. The EasyAsk software allows business users to ask questions in natural language (i.e., “show the latest sales figures for our widget product line in the last three months”); the software will immediately generate a report in response to the questions. Moreover, EasyAsk will expose additional BI assets or information that may be relevant.

Nedbank, the fourth largest bank in South Africa, relied on a third party reporting system for extracting information from databases. Before implementing EasyAsk software, business users had to first inform IT of the need for access to information locked away in databases. The IT department would then create a reporting program for that specific need, collect the data and create a report for the business user.

“We needed a data query tool that could create reusable criteria and deliver results faster than our current system could provide,” said Derick Oliver, data warehouse delivery manager, Nedbank. “We chose EasyAsk for Operational BI because of its ease-of-use and proven track record of successfully delivering information in a timely manner. Rather than requesting information from our IT department and waiting upwards of a month for the information, EasyAsk delivers accurate information within a day, without IT involvement. Better yet, reports created today can be used month after month, saving huge amounts of time and energy.”

The single ‘search box’ in EasyAsk also provides marketing employees at Nedbank with an easy-to-use data extraction tool, which they now use for customer segmentation analysis as a basis for marketing campaigns.

EasyAsk has helped other companies in South Africa reach their BI goals as well. Europ Assistance, Matrix Vehicle Tracking, and Integrated Healthcare Distribution all chose Progress EasyAsk as their Operational BI solution to meet their diverse Operational BI needs.

Europ Assistance, which offers customers roadside assistance, extracts data from their operational databases using EasyAsk. By granting all employees access to operational data, everyone in the South African office now makes better informed decisions faster.

EasyAsk is also used by all employees at Matrix Vehicle Tracking, a vehicle location monitoring company. They selected EasyAsk as their BI solution because of its ease of use for the entire organization coupled with its powerful data extraction and reporting functionality.

Integrated Healthcare Distribution had an existing BI tool in place when it switched to EasyAsk. The previous system featured a complicated user interface, making it difficult for all employees to access information and make use of it in their jobs. The switch to EasyAsk has empowered all employees, not just power users, with data access, making them more informed and efficient employees.

“The emergence of Progress EasyAsk software in the South African market demonstrates how our EasyAsk for Operational BI solution helps companies of any size realize their BI goals,” said Larry Harris, vice president and general manager, Progress EasyAsk. “A huge barrier to achieving the ‘promise’ of traditional BI tools is their inherent complexity that prohibits widespread adoption by the individuals that are most able to act on the insight for the benefit of the business. This, combined with costly licensing models, has limited the penetration and value of traditional BI tools, which then causes bottlenecks in the flow of information via the few that had the tools and the skills. With EasyAsk for Operational BI, we’ve solved these problems and the result is that business users now have more opportunities to use information in effective, revenue generating activities.”

Source: http://www.businessintelligence.com/ex/asp/id.3273/xe/binewsdetail.htm

Business Intelligence Resources on BetterManagement

BI Articles : Business Intelligence Resources on BetterManagement

Business Intelligence (BI) incorporates a wide range of information and data management techniques, beginning with data extraction, collection, cleansing, integration, aggregation, analysis and manipulation through the use of data marts, cubes, data warehouses and databases. The use of metadata and data modeling helps standardize data definitions and use across the enterprise. From these information sources, department and enterprise level reporting, monitoring, queries and analysis can be performed, and results presented as either ad hoc or standardized reports, dashboards, triggers and alerts.

Beyond reporting, business intelligence provides complex statistical capabilities such as trend analysis, predictive forecasting, pattern detection and analysis, optimization, guided decision-making and experiment design, among others. Through enterprise portals, business intelligence technologies can provide a wide range of users with the timely access to high quality data and advanced analytics they need to make smart strategic decisions and improve operational effectiveness.

Knowledge management methodologies record and disseminate both explicit and tacit process and performance strategies and actions to identify and share best practices and innovative techniques and ideas.

BetterManagement presents an extensive library of Business Intelligence topics and resources to help you implement effective information strategies that return the highest value. Live and archived webcasts, business management articles and editorials, business books, and many other industry-focused resources provide guidance and advice from Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Knowledge Management experts, as well as real-life examples from companies who are using business intelligence to maximize the value of their information resources.

Source: http://www.bettermanagement.com/topic/whatis.aspx?f=10