Terry Curran has worked in the IT industry for over 20 years after graduating from the University of Stirlling with an MSc in Software Engineering. He has considerable software development experience in many industries.

He has extensive knowledge of Cognos Reporting solutions, having worked with Cognos Business Intelligence software for a range of industries from Aviation to Pharmaceuticals over the past 10 years.

He is currently working as a freelance Cognos Business Intelligence consultant and contractor.

Marco Hartman is a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant, currently working at Imtech ICT Performance Solutions in the Netherlands.

He’s working with Cognos products since 2004. Starting with Cognos PowerPlay and Impromptu, he now is an expert in the Cognos 8 platform. Marco is fully certified for Cognos 8 BI (Author, Modeler, Administrator, Scorecarding), Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos TM1. Besides Cognos, he also has experience with Business Objects and Microsoft SQL Server BI.

Marco works on different projects and customers. He is a qualified consultant who understands the needs of the customers. Besides his projects he is a trainer at IBM Cognos, Netherlands. He also likes to anticipate new developments.

Marco studied Business Administration at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and specialized in ‘Knowledge and Information Management’. In his free time, he likes playing tennis and snowboarding.

Sascha Mertens graduated at the German University for Applied Sciences (HS Niederrhein) in 2001 as an engineer of economics. Focusing on the business part of his degree he began to work with Corporate Performance Management (CPM) topics in his thesis of ‘Redesign of a controlling system by means of a management information system (MIS)’.

When starting to work for Deloitte in 2001 he was trained and certified in Analyst and Contributor by Adaytum—the original software producer—before they were acquired by Cognos and subsequently by IBM. With his gained knowledge, Sascha started to work for the first German Planning project with the Volkswagen Financial Services AG which was brought up to a status that is still alive today.

With the modeling of system designs and architectural concepts as well as their implementations into CPM systems, Sascha developed all kinds of planning models such as sales planning, cost planning, personnel planning etc, up to the resulting financial plans. Closely working together with Cognos, Sascha became a beta tester for several upcoming Planning releases and a community leader in one of the leading Cognos Planning forums on the internet.

With a strong focus on the conceptual and business side, he conducted a study for the ‘State of planning within German companies’ (‘Standortbestimmung zur Planung in deutschen Unternehmen’) and offered various public webcasts such as ‘planning scenarios and simulations on board level’, ‘business planning for health insurance companies ‘, ‘decentralized sales planning within the franchise industry’, and ‘driver based planning within a fleet management company’.

During his time with Deloitte Sascha made up his way to a senior managing level and designed and implemented Cognos Planning on a full-time basis in over 15 Cognos Planning and BI projects nationally, European and overseas in the last six years.

Since 2008, Sascha has been working for conunit, a consulting firm specialized on CPM and BI solutions and ‘Cognos Partner of the year 2008 for Germany and Europe’. Within conunit Sascha and his team continue the Cognos Planning story with an offering of all kind of services around the IBM Cognos CPM and BI products including full scope projects (concept, design, and implementation), version upgrades and their migrations, as well as performance enhancements and system improvement checks.

Ramesh Parcha graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Gulbarga University in the year 1991.

After working for 7 years in Government Organization SETKHAM (Society for Training & Employment Promotion), Khammam, AP India, he worked for 4 Years in SIS Infotech Pvt ltd., Hyderabad, India.

He has also worked at the following places: