Q&A: Cognos CEO calls business intelligence ROI a 'fuzzy' metric
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Cognos CEO Rob Ashe says companies are demanding a more tangible means of measuring the return on their business intelligence investment.
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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IBM&#39;s $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.
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(Source: Tibco)  The future of business intelligence demands visualization capabilities that let users see the relationships among data, interactivity that lets them manipulate the data and an intuitive manner of working that suits the way business users think. Enterprise analytics enable business users to access the information and metrics relevant to their particular roles to assist the company in reaching its current goals and setting new ones for the future.
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After years of hearing that investing in IT was a smart strategic plan, business executives seem to have gotten the message, according to a new Gartner CIO survey released today -- but only when the dollars are going to technology efforts that have visible benefits for the bottom line, primarily externally facing initiatives involving customers or partners.
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Cognos Inc. CSN.TO COGN.O is   preparing to unplug its business analysis software from the   desktop PC and make it mobile, with plans for its first launch   on BlackBerry devices in early 2007.
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(Source: Tibco)  Every day, millions of individuals within large organizations make small, yet important business decisions based on their experience and whatever information happens to be available at the time. With little time to spare, these decisions are often taken with an incomplete view of the situation, as 'good information' is all too often still difficult to find. Faced with a backlog for new enterprise reports, out-of-control 'spreadsheet marts', and a plethora of custom applications all trying to accomplish similar goals, CIOs and business managers alike need to consider a new approach.
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IBM&#39;s $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.After examining the acquisition, the European Commission said in a statement that it &quot;would not give rise to competition concerns, since the parties&#39; combined market share would be moderate.&quot;IBM announced its intention to buy Cognos, based in Ottawa, in November, saying it hoped to combine the Cognos software with IBM&#39;s back-end database products. They hope to close the deal by the end of March, but there are still a few regulatory requirements to be met, including the approval of Canada&#39;s minister of industry.Business intelligence software is used to analyze data from different sources within a company and help management get a better picture of the business. Several business intelligence software vendors have been acquired recently, including&#160;Hyperion, purchased by Oracle, and&#160;Business Objects, purchased by SAP.IBM to date has partnered with business intelligence software vendors, providing the back-end infrastructure components. But changing customer demands sparked its interest in Cognos, according to Ambuj Goyal, general manager of information management in IBM&#39;s software group and a key player in the Cognos deal.&quot;Now, more and more clients are saying, &#39;We are not an integration technology business, we are in a business-outcome business. You do the integration,&#39;&quot; he said in a recent interview. &quot;More and more clients are not doing best-of-breed purchases.&quot;(Chris Kanaracus in Boston contributed to this story.)&#160;
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By Elise Ackerman; Connie LoizosSTAFF  AFEW YEARS AGO, a Wall Street analyst challenged a forecast Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker was making about the Internet giant's revenues.
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Software giant Cognos Inc. continued to strengthen its sales channel in Europe on Tuesday with the acquisition of a small operation located in Madrid, Spain.
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OTTAWA (CP) - Business software firm Cognos Inc. is offering $52.2 million US for Frango, a Stockholm-based company specializing in financial reporting.
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Cognos adds mobile BI support for Windows Mobile 6 and Nokia devices.
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(InfoWorld) - Two of three companies aim to grow faster than their markets this year, making it more important than ever for chief information officers to shift their priorities to encompass business objectives, according to a survey from Gartner. CIOs who do that will differentiate themselves, and their enterprise IT departments, and be leaders in an emerging trend where they and their employees have more business skills and acumen, said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. Gartner has surveyed CIOs for the annual study since 2002. More than 1,400 CIOs were queried worldwide. Gartner has identified four strategies that CIOs should pursue: technical excellence; enterprise agility; information effectiveness; and innovation. The third strategy involves using analytics and applying information to how business decisions are made, rather than how information is moved around a company's computer systems. Companies that "look at [information] as a resource as opposed to an asset to be managed had significantly better performance," McDonald said. Interestingly, the survey found that 86 percent of respondents identify innovation as critical to success, but only 26 percent said that innovation processes are sufficient to achieve goals. Although a corporate environment or culture that does not encourage innovation was flagged as the number-one roadblock, the survey found that among those who said that innovation processes are sufficient, corporate culture wasn't mentioned. Rather, those companies approach innovation as a "structured process" that generates results. Those enterprises also have "technology effectiveness," with IT departments that operate at "a service level" but keep costs under control. As for budgets, the survey found that IT departments on average will have more money for the fourth year in a row, but just 3 percent more on average and 3.4 percent among U.S. companies whose CIOs were surveyed. That's not much and points to the need to "do more with what you've got" as opposed to doing more with less, McDonald said. Along those lines, successful CIOs understand that "business knowledge has to become the highest common denominator across the IT shop." That presents a challenge for some companies where the IT department focus is more on technical expertise. "My coder should know how my company makes money regardless of the work they do," McDonald said. Ensuring that means that "you have to change the source of new recruits." More than 70 percent of CIOs anticipate they will hire new employees from IT shops at other companies rather than "tapping into the reservoir of talent within their own businesses." Recruiting from other IT departments means you wind up with "more of the same rather than someone who is different," he said. CIOs also need to focus on training for employees they already have, to help them develop heightened business acumen. That could include something as simple and inexpensive as brown-bag lunch sessions, McDonald said. Overall, Gartner finds that CIOs need to focus on "the next big round number" and develop a vision for 2010. The last such focus was in 2000 when "everybody was kind of willing to celebrate, but they were celebrating and laying out grand strategies with an eye over their shoulders because they weren't sure if their systems were going to collapse," he said. CIOs who don't look to 2010 and communicate a vision for their departments will find that others do that for them, McDonald said.
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IBM's US$5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.
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(InfoWorld) - If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.Â  A host of technology companies are working on the science behind taking these measurements. Perhaps the newest of these event stream processing or complex event processing vendors is Amalgamated Insight, a Silicon Valley startup founded on work led by co-founder and CTO Michael Franklin at U.C. Berkeley, where Franklin is a professor of computer science. Amalgamated is just emerging from stealth mode and may have a new name by the time you read this. The seed of Amalgamated was planted in Franklin's frustration at what he considered wrong-headed approaches to the analysis problem. Many seemed to think that analyzing event streams -- be they RFID events from sensor networks, service events from SOA networks, system events from traditional networks, events from financial markets, or other kinds of electronic transactions -- was merely a matter of plumbing. If you could just get this device talking with that device, you would somehow enable pervasive computing. "And my view," Franklin recalls, "was that once you solved the plumbing problems, what you've got is a data management problem. Because you've got huge volumes of data being created all over the place. Lots of applications need that data, and lots of users need insight into what's going on in these dispersed environments." Beyond the plumbing, others were trying to reinvent the wheel. Attending an RFID standardization meeting as a guest, Franklin listened as group after group, each working at a different level of the system, described the data at their level and how to access it. And he realized, each one was defining a data model and a query language, and each one was different. That's when the seed sprouted. "Sitting there as a database guy, I was just getting irritated," he says. "Jeez, why wouldn't you just use SQL for all of this stuff across all the levels? And on the way home from that meeting, I realized, well, you know, why don't I just do that." Amalgamated's three-part solution combines a stream processing engine, a Java-based integration framework, and a visualization front end based on Adobe Flex. Naturally, the processing engine, which is embedded into the open-source PostgreSQL database, uses SQL to continuously query events as they flow past. "It lets you write SQL queries that are basically always running," Franklin explains. "They're always producing the answer so far based on the data they've seen so far." To enable SQL to query infinite data streams, Amalgamated extended it in two ways, adding a windowing capability to restrict the amount of data it would be exposed to in any instant and adding some "syntactic sugar" to define event patterns you might want to inspect. The "continuous analysis" engine is adaptive, Franklin says, meaning you can add or remove queries on the fly. Amalgamated sees the decision to embed the core processing engine in Postgres not only as key to advancing the development effort, but also as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Franklin notes that it gave the solution complete SQL, JDBC, and ODBC interfaces, internationalization, and all of the extensibility of Postgres right out of the box. As Boyd Pierce, the company's president and CEO, points out, Postgres lets users of Amalgamated's engine to write SQL that joins tables and streams, provides subqueries and views, and does all the magic that SQL can do. Programmers already know how to code in it. "We got all that based on having Postgres," Pierce notes. "But the other thing we've found in dealing with customers in our application space is that if you don't have a relational database that speaks full SQL and lets people program, you're hugely disadvantaged in terms of doing what the customer needs." Noting that Postgres allowed Amalgamated "to jump in front of a 10-year database systems development curve," Franklin sees a larger lesson in building on the open-source database. "We really hit upon what I think is the future of enterprise software development," he concludes. "If you start from scratch today, if you're building anything complex, you're crazy. That's just not going to be a viable way to build enterprise software in the future. You're going to have to leverage open source and other available tools that are out there."
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If you think of your business as a car and your IT infrastructure as the road it travels on, then your business processes are the tires that let the car move along the road. What we are seeing now, at an ever increasing rate, is CFOs asking CIOs to kick the tires and check the air pressure. Analogies aside, CFOs want CIOs to get more involved in process design across the company.
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Right-time business intelligence is all about delivering the right information in the right format to the right people at the right time for decision-making purposes .In this report, we present an in-depth case study describing the right-time BI solution implemented by Sybase customer Shopzilla to improve the effectiveness of business decisions.  The company uses Sybase IQ to capture and access merchant consumer survey data in a data warehouse.