Cognos brings unity to BI toolset.

In its ongoing war for market share with archrival Business Objects, Cognos has come late to the current battlefield. Years after Business Objects first started providing its products as an integrated business intelligence (BI) suite, Cognos finally followed suit in January 2002 with, EP Series 7.

One reason for the delay, according to CEO Ron Zambonini, was that the company needed to ensure that the migration path for customers of its existing standalone systems was smooth. For Cognos, this also meant a degree of organisational realignment: whereas research and development was once demarcated along product lines, it is now pooled centrally at Cognos' headquarters in Ottawa.

Above all, Series 7 creates a consistent user experience across all products and eliminates mismatch between tools by implementing a single, underlying data model.

Users will still be able to buy the core individual components that make up the suite: PowerPlay for online analytical processing; Impromptu for enterprise reporting; Visualizer for business performance scorecarding and decision support; Query for ad hoc data exploration; and Decisionstream for extraction, transformation and loading. Cognos has also introduced additional capabilities to the suite, including an event detection mechanism, NoticeCast, which triggers responses when exceptional data thresholds are crossed.

Alongside that suite, Cognos has been moving quickly into analytic applications with pre-built packages for inventory, procurement, general ledger, sales and accounts analysis within Oracle's eBusiness Suite, JD Edwards' OneWorld, and SAP R/3.

Like its competitors, extending the use of BI tools from analysts to general business users and even to external partners has become an important revenue driver for Cognos. As an indicator of that trend, in its fourth fiscal quarter ending February 2002 new contracts exceeding $200,000 increased 41%. However, while its archenemy Business Objects has continued to grow through the economic downdraft, Cognos has been shrinking. Now, at the beginning of a new product cycle, the company is hoping to reverse those experiences.

Company: Cognos

Product: EP Series 7

CEO: Ron Zambonini

HQ: Ottawa, Canada

Status: Publicly listed on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange 

Key financials: For the year to 28 February 2002, the company reported net income of $26.9 million, down from $36.2 million in 2001, on revenue that slipped 1% to $491.3 million.

Key competitors: Business Objects, Brio, Information Builders, Microsoft, Oracle, Hyperion

Infoconomy comment: Cognos has lagged its competitors in providing an enterprise BI suite. It must now convince existing customers that it was worth the wait and that by extending their investment to EP Series 7 they will see considerable business benefits.

www.cognos.com