Does the Cognos Celequest Deal Have Legs?

Everyone agrees that Cognos’ purchase of Celequest, announced yesterday, will broaden the BI vendor’s footprint. But the true value of the deal will hinge on how transferable and how integrated Celequest’s real-time technology and appliance/SaaS model will be with the Cognos 8 BI platform.

Yes, Celequest gives Cognos a real-time, operational BI/performance management play it lacked, and that’s important (see trend six in “Seven Trends for 2007.”) Celequest’s Lava appliance is designed to monitor transactional systems (as well as data warehouses) and instantly display key metrics within user-customizable dashboards. That will bring Cognos into operational settings — in financial services, risk management, manufacturing and supply chains — in which insight is only of value if it’s immediate, delivered through real-time dashboards and alerts.

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Cognos gets SaaSy with Salesforce.com

Cognos has joined salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the first on-demand directory and sharing service for business applications. With Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) now listed on AppExchange, Salesforce Winter ‘07 customers will be able to learn how the zero-footprint, enterprise-class reporting and analysis capabilities can enable them to gain greater insight and understanding into sales and marketing initiatives.

This announcement supports Cognos’ vision of pervasive BI, making BI accessible to more people and enabling higher adoption of business intelligence for enhanced decision making and improved organizational performance. Cognos’ BI solution delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. Now a new class of users, salesforce.com customers, can leverage a complete and proven BI solution to extend the value of information across the organization and gain answers to new business questions in the context of other corporate information.

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Cognos eats up Celequest

“This is a great complementary acquisition for Cognos. Celequest’s innovation in self service dashboard creation and real-time information monitoring extends our vision for operational BI and enhances our market- leading performance management solution,” said Rob Rose, chief strategy officer at Cognos. “This gives us the opportunity to reach a new class of users who need to continuously monitor performance against key metrics and make decisions based on real-time, operational information. Celequest’s operational dashboards are immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 BI, delivering a more complete view of enterprise information for better overall performance management.”

Celequest is the industry’s only dashboarding solution to be offered as an appliance or via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which allows for fast and low-cost deployment — a big advantage for departments or companies with limited staff and IT resources. Powered by patent-pending, in-memory streaming technology, users can monitor real-time feeds from transactional systems. Celequest is certified on AppExchange and can continuously monitor Salesforce data in a hosted environment. And with process or user-triggered alerts, operational managers in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, and retail can see the most relevant information at the time they need it most, easing their ability to manage day-to-day business activities relating to risk exposure, operational efficiency, or inventory control.

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Cognos for Atlanta

Atlanta selected Cognos 8 BI to aggregate disparate data from multiple sources, such as PeopleSoft, to provide information access and visibility for more than 1,500 government officials across all city departments, from the Mayor to individual managers in its Atlanta Stat process. For example, Atlanta’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs is now able to have self-service access to real-time information such as service level vendor agreements, and analyze the impact of performance at the field-crew-level on common functions across the city. Previously, this process would have required weeks of resource-intensive efforts.

“In the City of Atlanta, we needed a total performance management solution that would enable us to become a more efficient, cost-effective and accountable government organization,” said Chuck Meadows, Chief, Budget & Fiscal Policy, City of Atlanta. “With Cognos 8 BI, we can more easily communicate and manage performance goals and service level agreements across our agencies citywide. By selecting Cognos as our performance management solution, we can eliminate the need for additional solutions while driving enhanced performance throughout the organization, ultimately resulting in better services for our citizens.”

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Australian University deploys Cognos

In late 2004, Deakin University deployed Cognos as its reporting solution to keep executive management and government up to date on student enrollment information. The university decided to upgrade to Cognos 8 BI for increased flexibility in filtering and building ad-hoc reports to support decisions across the entire university. For example, a faculty member can now look at data on student load and slice the data in any dimension to focus on specific student characteristics. The organization also wanted the flexibility to roll out analysis, metrics, and event management capabilities to support changing business needs in the future within Cognos 8 BI’s single product and architecture. Finally, Deakin University plans to expand Cognos 8 BI to report HR and financial information from several transactional data systems which reside outside of the data warehouse, such as Alesco.

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Business Case a Must For Business Intelligence

New research puts analytics and other business intelligence capabilities at the heart of modern marketing. And after disaster recovery and Web services, business intelligence appears in more IT budgets than any other IT initiative. This underlines the importance of building a business case to support successful enterprise business intelligence deployments, says Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing at Cognos, one of the world’s leading providers of business intelligence and performance management solutions.

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Cognos Can’t Shake Buyout Buzz

Investors have been waiting — and waiting — for someone to make a move on business intelligence software maker Cognos (COGN – commentary – Cramer’s Take – Rating). The stock has run up nearly 20% in the last few months, mainly propelled by “unsubstantiated takeout speculation,” says Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher, who downgraded the stock to neutral on Tuesday.

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Cognos Previews Cognos 8 Go! Mobile

BURLINGTON, Mass., Sept. 25 — Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today previewed Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, a new BI solution that will bring decision-support information directly to mobile device users for right-time decision making. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile represents Cognos’ next milestone in making BI accessible to more people and enabling higher adoption of business intelligence for enhanced decision making and improved organizational performance.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. To further enable faster and more effective decisions, Cognos offers additional access options that bring BI to familiar working environments of every worker. Cognos 8 Go! Search helps users easily and instantly find strategic BI metrics and information. Cognos 8 Go! Office lets users view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft® Excel®, PowerPoint® and Word. Previewed today, Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will help users make more informed decisions in context to quickly improve individual effectiveness and organizational performance when mobile, while enabling IT to further leverage existing investments in Cognos 8 BI to continue lowering the overall cost of ownership.

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Steak n Shake Selects Cognos 8 Business Intelligence as Enterprise Performance Reporting Standard

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 24 /CNW/ — 2006 Oracle OpenWorld, Booth (number sign)1424 — Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN – News; TSX: CSN – News), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that Steak n Shake, one of the largest and oldest restaurant chains in the U.S., has selected Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) as its enterprise standard for performance reporting, scorecarding and dashboarding. With more than 440 restaurants across the country, Steak n Shake executives recognized the importance of delivering accurate and timely performance information to all store managers to help them make quicker and more accurate decisions about their operations. The challenge was finding a centralized performance management platform that was robust enough to deliver a single version of the truth across the chain via a flexible set of standard and customized reporting capabilities.

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Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Validated with Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise EPM 8.9

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — ORACLE OPENWORLD, BOOTH 1424 — Cognos (Nachrichten) (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), a world leader in business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions, today announced validated out of the box integration between Cognos 8 BI and Oracle PeopleSoft(R) Enterprise EPM 8.9. Through Cognos 8 BI, PeopleSoft (Nachrichten/Aktienkurs) metadata and security is analyzed and published to the Cognos environment which immediately enables secured business intelligence directly on customer’s PeopleSoft Enterprise EPM 8.9 deployments. This integration allows joint global customers to rapidly deploy Cognos 8 BI’s proven reporting, dashboarding, analysis, querying and scorecarding capabilities across their organization. Customers can combine both Peoplesoft and non-Peoplesoft data together in a single report, immediately uncover and capitalize on profit-building opportunities, establish critical business metrics, evaluate enterprise efficiency, and empower employees to make better decisions.

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