STORAGE

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced it is extending its open data strategy through the company's strengthened partnership with IBM. As an extension to Cognos' open data strategy, Cognos has enhanced its support of IBM's DB2 Information Integrator product in its latest release of Cognos ReportNet for customers who have requirements to access a diverse set of data sources including mainframe, database, and content systems. Cognos' solutions, built upon the crucial information infrastructure layer provided by IBM DB2, offer the benefit of flexible, intuitive data access tools integrated with an efficient, automated data management process. Based on open standards and a mission to help customers better leverage IT investments, IBM's DB2 Information Integrator software helps businesses access and integrate any data -- e-mail, XML, multi-media, Web services, and competitive data sources such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases -- wherever it resides, in real-time, as if it were stored in one place. DB2 Information Integrator extends the reach of ReportNet to a wide variety of information sources, including traditional, mainframe non-DB2 data sources such as VSAM and IMS, and content repositories such as IBM DB2 Content Manager, FileNet and EMC/Documentum. With this unparalleled breadth of information, Cognos customers can understand and drive corporate performance leveraging their entire enterprise information assets. "Through our commitment to IBM's initiatives, and our commitment to open standards, we are making it easier than ever for Cognos users to discover new ways of meeting their corporate performance management requirements," said Patrick O'Leary, vice president of strategic alliances at Cognos. "With functionalities such as seamless views of multiple disparate data sources and querying across databases, without the overhead or the limitations, DB2 Information Integrator provides an open, extensible, and consistent information integration framework for access to business-critical content." By accessing message queues, Cognos' solutions can monitor real-time data within organizations that have EAI systems. Cognos customers needing critical elements of business activity monitoring (BAM) and guided analysis can define highly personalized business alerts that can be delivered to any e-mail- enabled device. The federated data access capabilities of DB2 Information Integrator extends Cognos' reach to include non-relational data sources such as any remote SOAP Web Service, Flat Files, XML files, and content repositories. "Organizations large and small are struggling to take advantage of real- time information across the enterprise for better decision-making and overall effectiveness," said Nelson Mattos, vice president, Information Integration, IBM Software. "With DB2 Information Integrator and Cognos business intelligence solutions, businesses can reliably integrate and reconcile the widely dispersed customer data that resides in enterprise applications, as well as unstructured document collections, across channels, geographies, and business units." Cognos recently achieved premier level status within IBM's PartnerWorld for Developers, and is certified as an IBM Total Storage Proven and an IBM Server Proven partner.