Cognos, Hyperion Seek BI Advantage

Business intelligence software developers Cognos Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. are taking steps to make it easier for enterprises to adopt their products as a BI standard.

Cognos plans to announce in late June at its Cognos Forum user conference in Orlando, Fla., the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines query and reporting, analysis, metrics management, dashboarding, event management, and planning. It also adds platform services such as portal, security, administration, information and business modeling, and data integration, which leverage existing infrastructure technologies already in place in enterprises.

Cognos, of Ottawa, also plans to announce a new partner program, Powered by Cognos, thats designed to encourage business partners to build solutions around Performance Management System; it also plans to introduce three new Plan-to-Perform Blueprints for developing performance management solutions.

Cognos reports an increased profit for Q1. Click here to read more.

"I see Cognos ahead of the pack in understanding that its a lot more than just tools," said Andrew Wojewodka, director of business systems and decision support services for Del Monte Foods Co., in Pittsburgh, which has adopted Cognos technologies as its BI standard. "Its how the tools work cohesively together to make information actionable."

Hyperion, meanwhile, is continuing development work on its "Project Avalanche"—not to be confused with the Microsoft Corp. and open-source projects of the same name—to unite various BI and business performance management technologies into a single product, with the first deliverables slated to be generally available later this summer.

The product that emerges from Avalanche will support multidimensional analysis, relational query and reporting, operational reporting, financial reporting, metrics management, Microsoft Office integration, dashboards, and score cards from a single product rather than from a suite of products that Hyperion and other BI vendors offer today.

A second release of the product, planned for next summer, will support a data abstraction layer that will show information from wherever enterprise data is located, a feature that Hyperion Chief Technology Officer John Kopcke calls "universal data access."

"The user doesnt need to know where the data is; all sources will look the same," Kopcke said. "All those complexities will be removed. What Google has done for the Internet, well be able to do within the walls of an organization."

Hyperion, of Santa Clara, Calif., later this summer plans to update the master data management technology it acquired from Razza Solutions Inc. earlier this year with an n-tier architecture, replacing the current client/server architecture. The updated version will support a much larger number of simultaneous users, said Kopcke.

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