Cognos BI 8.3 launches worldwide

Cognos today launched the latest iteration of its business intelligence (BI) product, aimed at managing and improving business performance by delivering more targeted information to more users in a way that suits them best.

The company, which is in the midst of a $5 billion takeover by IBM, chose New York's Gotham Hall to unveil further details about Cognos BI version 8.3, the third major release of its BI pedigree, which launched in 2005.

Cognos 8.3 is aimed at helping mid-sized and large organisations enhance their strategic decision making capabilities by transforming data into relevant performance-related information that can easily be interpreted by any key knowledge worker, whatever their specific role may be.

The new release marries together the enhanced features of the Cognos 8 platform with new functionality, such as briefing books, business-driven modeling and scorecard portlets. It is also easy for IT administrators to deploy and manage as they ramp up organisational adoption to include a wider range of business stakeholders, according to Rob Ashe, Cognos' chief executive.

"It's fitting that we're in this great building Gotham Hall. It's fitting that we're in this sturdy, foundational building with what we're launching today - Cognos 8.3," he told the assembled audience as well as those listening into a live web cast of the event.

"Cognos 8.3 is the result of a 20-year journey of innovation. It's been a long journey to get where we are. Performance management is in our blood. It's in our DNA," he said.

The release has already broken a record of sorts, as it's spent the longest time in testing than any of the company's other products, according to Ashe.

Ashe's obvious enthusiasm for the new product, which is available from today, was echoed by Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing at Cognos, who also took to the stage to detail the new components - including modelling best practices, proactive administration, system health snapshots and an upgrade manager - and the business value the BI giant claims they will deliver.

"These key advancements will help organisations see a greater return on their BI investments, especially as they expand their community of Cognos BI users," she said. "Customers will be able to improve overall business performance by enabling diverse users- from front-line business personnel to financial analysts to executives - to receive personalised, relevant information where, when and how they need it. Users across the organisation can make better, more informed decisions, and IT can more easily deploy and manage their BI solutions."

The launch of Cognos 8.3 is a major one for the company and is likely to be the last one we see from it as an independent entity before the IBM acquisition is complete, according to Helena Schwenk, a senior analyst at Ovum.

"Today's launch specifically focuses on the enhancements made to the platform's [Cognos 8] BI capabilities that make it easier to manage and deploy, and the integration of its planning and consolidation products (Cognos Planning and Cognos Controller). This launch also includes new best practise performance management blueprints and training, support and consulting packages," she said.

"While Cognos 8.3 is a substantial and comprehensive release it does not include all the company's product portfolio. In particular, PowerPlay 7 the company's well established and legacy OLAP tool has yet to fully transition to Cognos 8 although the cube building product - Transformer - has now moved... Completing this process will play a pivotal role in improving migration numbers to Cognos 8 (around 15 per cent of customers have completed migration) and would help reduce the support and development costs arising from separate product lines."

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