INDUSTRY

HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Plumtree Odyssey User Conference -- Enterprise Web leader Plumtree Software and Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced an alliance to deliver comprehensive dashboard and scorecarding applications for the Enterprise Web. Powered by Cognos Metrics Manager, Cognos' industry-leading scorecarding solution, and Plumtree's Enterprise Web Suite, the planned applications give organizations a unified, contextual view of key performance and financial indicators from across the enterprise. The Cognos-Plumtree applications are designed to help organizations actively monitor performance, respond more quickly to new opportunities, and gain competitive advantage. Plumtree and Cognos are presently co-developing the solution and hope to release it as a product offering by early in 2004. Karen Williams, vice president of product marketing at Cognos will unveil a prototype of the application at Plumtree's user conference, Odyssey 2003 as part of Plumtree's Enterprise Applications Launch. "Our campaign against the empty portal has culminated in a program to fill up the Enterprise Web with applications, data, and services from all over an organization to give business audiences everything they need to their jobs in one place," said Plumtree CEO John Kunze. "To do that, we're aligning with leading application vendors such as Cognos. The executive dashboard idea gives managers and executive's a bird's-eye view of their business, with the ability to drill down into problem areas." "The true value of scorecards is having the entire workforce focused on what the leaders have determined is strategic," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president of global marketing, Cognos. "We believe that dashboards are one of many business intelligence-driven applications being deployed within the enterprise and that Plumtree's Enterprise Web software provides a framework for delivering these applications to large audiences quickly, and at low cost." Plumtree-Cognos Executive Dashboard and Scorecarding Applications The anticipated Plumtree-Cognos applications combine the performance management capabilities of Cognos' Metrics Manager with other information, data and services available through the Enterprise Web. The goal is to enable an executive to log-in to one Enterprise Web site and access not just an executive dashboard or scorecard, but all the other Web applications he or she needs to run the business, avoiding the cost and hassle of separate sites with separate security. A typical dashboard could include: -- Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma metrics from Cognos Metrics Manager or other systems; -- Sales bookings and forecasts; -- Monthly close data contrasted with plan; -- Marketing programs results and costs; -- Upcoming company events and press releases; -- Company announcements; -- Customer call center queues and satisfaction data; -- Research and development schedules; -- Inventory levels and manufacturing production updates; -- Competitive intelligence briefing, with news articles and analyses; -- Systems availability and up-time statistics; and -- Employee attrition rates and training schedules. To incorporate services from Cognos products into the Enterprise Web, Plumtree relies on a set of industry-standard portlets and an entire range of integration Web services that Plumtree has created for federating searches, synchronizing with user and group security, identifying and indexing content, and creating a common user profile. The executive dashboard and scorecarding applications will be designed to take advantage of the new capabilities of the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite for supporting a volume and variety of Web applications, each with its own brand, security and administration.