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Cognos: New BI Tools, But What's Next?
By Bob Violino
Cognos, which was acquired by IBM in January for $5 billion, is one of the leading providers of business intelligence and performance management software products. Its enterprise BI, planning and consolidation software and services are designed to help organizations better plan, understand and manage their financial and operational performance.
Cognos has more than 23,000 customers in about 135 countries, and its products and services are available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. Customers include Arla Foods, Harrah's, HSBC Hong Kong, Canadian Tire, Manpower, Mercedes-AMG and Suncorp. The company focuses on specific vertical markets including the public sector, retail, manufacturing, life sciences, insurance and financial services, according to a spokeswoman.
For its most recent financial reporting period prior to the acquisition by IBM, the third quarter of fiscal 2008 ended Nov. 30, Cognos posted revenue of $288.2 million, up 16% from $247.8 million for the same period of the previous year. Net income in the quarter was $31 million, up from $16.5 million for the year-earlier period. Cognos reported revenue growth across all three revenue categories: license (16%), support (15%) and professional services (19%). Revenue for the first nine months of the year was $777.3 million, up from $694.7 million in fiscal 2007. Net income was $79.9 million, up from $54.8 million.
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In January, Cognos unveiled its latest product, IBM Cognos 8 BI v3, the third major release of the company's flagship BI product introduced in 2005. The software is designed for large enterprises and mid-market organizations, and enables business managers and senior executives to receive strategic business information.
Cognos 8 BI v3 includes new and enhanced BI user capabilities and other advances in the platform, which is based on a services oriented architecture (SOA)-based platform.
Many of new capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI v3 are designed to deliver more precise information to more user communities. These features include Express Authoring Mode, which provides a self-service reporting interface for finance and business analysts to access financial and operational data sources and create financial statement style reports; Business Driven Modeling with New Transformer Capabilities, which gives business groups the ability to create and manage their own perspectives of performance information; and Scorecard Portlets, which lets users leverage a portal-based dashboard to access all of an organization's relevant strategy management, scorecard information and diagrams in one view.
Cognos has achieved much of its success through innovation and close partnerships with its customers, according to Rob Ashe, former president and CEO of Cognos and currently general manager, Business Intelligence and Performance Management, for IBM's Cognos team
"We collaborate with our customers in the various communities that they're in, whether it be the communities of experts that we established through innovation centers, our blueprints, our solutions, our partners," or via direct involvement with customers that gives Cognos ideas for new products, Ashe said at the company's launch of IBM Cognos 8 BI v3 in January.
Among its innovations: Cognos was the first to market a BI product for mobile devices and the first to re-architect its entire platform for a SOA environment.
As for future developments, Ashe says the blend of social networking applications and BI capabilities will be a trend to watch. As more organizations rely on social networking and other forms of online collaboration, they will want to tie in BI capabilities. Composite applications, mash-ups and BI applications provided via mobile devices and across organizations' Web sites-integrated with search capabilities-will usher in a new era of business optimization, he says.
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