IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) is a web-oriented solution with a variety of dashboards, analyses, reports, events, and many other features. Cognos gives diverse options to users whether they are data modelers, report authors, analysis team, administrators, or end users. Cognos works best on an RDBMS and OLAP database that is designed on warehousing architecture, although it can work with any database design. With the help of Cognos, organizations use all their company data sources for better future decisions and can thus achieve their goals.
Since this book will be focusing more on Cognos Administration, we will not go into its detailed history, but a brief history is necessary for a new audience.
Cognos (Cognos Inc.) started in Ottawa, and they specialized in making Business Intelligence and Performance Management software.
Alan Rushforth founded Cognos in 1969 along with Peter Glenister. Later in 1972, Michael Potter also joined in.
Cognos Inc. launched their BI 8 product in the year 2005. It included many of the past features of various Cognos Inc. products. Amongst those products were ReportNet, PowerPlay, NoticeCast, DecisionStream, and Cognos 8 Metrics Manager.
Cognos BI 8 also had Express and Extended versions.
The features of Cognos BI 8 include the following:
- Report Studio: This is used for creating professional reports.
- Query Studio: This is used for ad-hoc reporting.
- Analysis Studio: This is used for working in multidimensional cube data.
- Metric Studio: This is used for analyzing, monitoring, and reporting on KPIs.
- Metric Designer: This is used for defining, loading, and maintaining metrics in Metric Studio.
- Event Studio: This helps in notifying decision makers on action-based agents as and when the events happen.
- Framework Manager: This is a modeling tool and a semantic metadata-layer software tool, which is used for creating models and packages.
- PowerPlay Studio: This was formerly known as PowerPlay Web. This is used to create and view PowerCube data source based reports.
- Analytic Applications: This is built on a platform that is adaptable and extensible to Business Analytics (BA). This is also a packaged BI application.
As far as achievements are concerned, IBM Cognos 8 BI won many prizes and awards, including the eWEEK Excellence Award in Analytics and Reportingand Lotus Advisor Editor's Choice Award. The SearchCRM website by TechTarget declared Cognos 8 BI as the Product of the Year in 2005.
IBM acquired Cognos for $4.9 billion in November 2007. Cognos operated as a subsidiary of IBM. In the same year, as per the Maclean's magazine, Cognos to appeared in the Top 100 Employers list in Canada.
Cognos BI became the IBM InfoSphere product line in January 2009 under the IBM Information Management Software brand.
In September 2009, IBM launched Cognos Express. It was started with the purpose of meeting the needs of middle-sized companies, and is an integrated BI and planning solution.
The features of the Express version are as follows:
Prior to the BI offerings, Cognos also offered several Application Development tools:
PowerHouse is actually how Cognos made its money before the BI market appeared.
In October 2010, Cognos Version 10 was announced. This was considered a major upgrade to IBM Cognos 8. There were quite a lot of enhancements and new features in this version. Analytics for business users and social collaboration were brought together to achieve real-time BI in a user-friendly environment with all the required features under one roof. Additionally, Cognos Mobile gave users the opportunity to access analysis results and reports on the go, that is, on mobiles such as iPhone, BlackBerry, and iPad.
Now this software is known as IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management.