INDUSTRY

Cognos, a leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced the latest version of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (MR1). This new version of Cognos 8 BI includes new search and reporting capabilities to extend the reach of BI to more users, and expanded enterprise-application and data support to help maximize operational infrastructure investments. "We are continuing our market leadership by further enhancing the proven capabilities in Cognos 8 BI," said Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing, Cognos. "With the additional support for enterprise applications in Cognos 8 BI, we can help companies unlock the potential of their ERP investments by providing intuitive ways to measure, monitor, and analyze business information. Cognos 8 BI also allows companies to share that information with more people to improve and accelerate business decisions, and empower people to take action with greater confidence." Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified, zero-footprint interface for all users, authors and administrators. Easy to integrate, deploy and use, Cognos 8 BI delivers a complete BI environment that drives high user adoption, promotes self-service authoring, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale technology foundation for performance management. New capabilities announced today include: * BI search: Cognos Go! Search Service, a new BI search capability, will enable users to instantly find relevant, strategic enterprise information available through Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. With a familiar, browser-based search that ranks results based on user priorities, Cognos Go! will deliver users an intuitive and efficient way of quickly finding BI information and data presented in reports, analyses, dashboards, metric information, and events across the organization * Extended Cognos Office Connection: In addition to the ability to embed refreshable reports within Microsoft Excel, users can now view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel. This ensures centralized control and manageability of information and helps extend the reach of trusted BI content to more users within a familiar environment without requiring additional IT support. Cognos Office Connection enables users to enhance Microsoft Office documents with accurate, rich data, and share those documents and BI content throughout the organization. * Access to mySAP and Siebel: The new Cognos 8 Report Packs for mySAP FI/CO (for SAP R/3 data) and Siebel CRM extend the value of current enterprise investments for customers by providing business users, for the first time, the ability to combine in one report or dashboard, historic data from the data warehouse with current data in mySAP and Siebel CRM transaction systems without additional coding. As a result, organizations achieve the most complete view of enterprise performance while eliminating costs and effort required for separate operational reporting projects. Cognos 8 Report Packs also deliver pre- defined content for more than 60 commonly used reports to provide immediate access to mySAP and Siebel CRM data within a business context. The Cognos Data Adapter provides one-click connectivity into mySAP and Siebel, delivering secure and trusted pathways to build additional reports. The Cognos 8 Report Packs and Cognos Data Adapter extend underlying functionality provided by Composite Software. * Certified SAP NetWeaver Support: Cognos 8 BI received updated certification for SAP NetWeaver, allowing customers to access data in the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), deploy Cognos 8 BI on the SAP Web Application Server, and display information through the SAP NetWeaver Portal. Customers can extend beyond reporting to create robust dashboards and active scorecards, and conduct deep analysis, dimensional reporting, and business event management on the SAP infrastructure. Additionally, Cognos continues to deliver self-service capabilities to SAP NetWeaver users by providing out-of-the-box support for more than 80 additional functions, many of which are not available natively in SAP NetWeaver. Cognos 8 BI provides end users with a single place to go for all BI across the enterprise by bridging numerous data sources, such as multiple SAP BW InfoProviders, multiple instances of SAP BW, and non-SAP BW data (including mySAP and other relational and OLAP sources). * Additional Platform and Data Support: Cognos also offers updated support for HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, BEA WebLogic Server 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15, Teradata Warehouse 8.1, ORACLE Database 10g v2, and Netezza Performance Server system. "Cognos 8 Business Intelligence delivers significant productivity benefits for end users, report developers, and IT organizations with the new search, reporting, and enterprise-application support capabilities," said Dan Vesset, research director, Analytics and Data Warehousing Software, IDC. "Organizations are constantly challenged to extend BI to more users and more data sources and with these enhancements, Cognos is meeting a market demand to provide one holistic view of historical and current operational data in one product. I would expect a positive reaction to the Cognos 8 Report Packs and the extended self-service capabilities for SAP NetWeaver users." Cognos will be showcasing the latest version of Cognos 8 BI this week in Las Vegas at the SAP NetWeaver BI and Portals 2006 conference at booth 213 in the Solutions Showcase, and will be presenting with Mold-Masters on Monday, March 27, from 6:45 - 7:15 p.m. in the Vendor Theater.