IBM Charts a Course for Cognos

IBM's decision to purchase Cognos, announced last November, wasn't much of a surprise given Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion in April and SAP's October announcement that it would buy Business Objects. Still, the move did raise some eyebrows. It was seen as something of a departure for the company, which until that time had not penetrated the business intelligence (BI) software space to any great extent. Some observers saw the deal as little more than a me-too purchase, and many Cognos users worried that IBM would quickly lose interest in the acquisition.

While IBM had a strong presence in finance organizations through its global business services operation at the time of the acquisition, its software group "was not really playing a large role within the CFO's office and the finance department," says Marc Andrews, director of IBM's information on demand strategy. But that's about to change in a big way. The company this month announced its strategy for the future of its Cognos property together with a slew of new integrated offerings aimed squarely at finance leadership.

The "information on demand" banner strategy "is really about unlocking the business value of information so that it can be used to drive competitive advantage for the organization," says Andrews. "What we're seeing is that organizations continue to have silos of information across the enterprise. Information is created by different applications and maintained in different departments, and the volume and variety of different types of data organizations have to deal with is growing exponentially."

One of the big attractions of Cognos for IBM was its focus on breaking down those walls. "Cognos has focused on providing an integrated planning capability across the enterprise to enable more coordinated decision-making, so that you can see the impact on the overall business when you change your plan," notes Andrews. "You can share key business objectives, targets, and metrics across the different departments and across multiple plans.

"For example, if there's a key profitability metric that cuts across the organization, it can be shared across all the individual plans instead of them having their individual objectives. This has been a big issue we've seen with CEOs and CFOs -- trying to drive more strategic alignment."

Among the new offerings are solutions aimed at verticals such as banking, health care, government, and manufacturing. Although some of IBM's customers prefer best-of-breed products, companies increasingly are making their investment decisions based on business transformation-oriented projects, Andrews reports. "What that means is they require the ability not just to have this technology but to be provided with an understanding of how they can apply it to their particular business needs -- whether it's driving customer and product profit in retail, providing increased financial risk insight in banking, or enabling multi-channel marketing or a dynamic supply chain in other industries."

Another offering that CFOs might want to investigate is the new IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control, a solution that combines software, hardware, and services. The Cognos element here is technology for monitoring, reporting, and analyzing compliance-related content.

But IBM backs that up with an impressive range of functions including records management, enterprise content management, content classification technologies (a recent IBM introduction), process management, and storage management, as well as the underlying hardware infrastructure.

And let's not forget the services component. "We have the expertise to help organizations understand the issues they need to be addressing and how to apply these technologies to make sure they're addressing whichever regulations are relevant to their particular business," says Andrews.

Other new offerings include a Cognos "starter pack" for IBM's InfoSphere Warehouse and pre-configured templates for integrating Cognos with IBM's FileNet business process management software.

The scope of the new product portfolio leaves no doubt that IBM is in the business intelligence game for the long haul. "This is going to be a continued area of focus for us," says Andrews, emphasizing "the significant value that Cognos brings to the table in its products, expertise and capabilities for addressing the needs of the CFO."