Partner ecosystem crucial to Cognos' success

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Cognos plans to beef up its focus on partnerships and strategic alliances as it goes all out to grab more market share, particularly in emerging countries and, in one example of this in action, its chief executive is meeting with one of its key partners to renew vows later this month.

So says Mel Zeledon, senior vice president, global alliances at Cognos, who choose the day after the launch of the company's BI 8.3 system to detail how its partnership ecosystem will be critical to the new technology's adoption among existing customers as well as expanding its reach to new geographies.

"In order to really maximise growth and opportunities in the market, it's not just Cognos that has to do it. The partnership ecosystem has to be involved. [The theme of the launch of] Cognos BI 8.3 is DNA for performance management and, in turn, we consider alliances to be part of the DNA of the company," he said.

"It's not good enough to have partnerships on paper. Every single component of the company needs to work with and get engaged with that partner. We have made a lot of progress in the last year in making the vision become a reality in terms of becoming the best performance management partner and will continue to make investments in the ecosystem that helps us to get bigger market share and more success for customers."

The BI giant is involved with a large number of partners at many different levels. These big names include soon to-be-parent IBM, Accenture, Deloitte and EDS and offshore outsourcing giants Infosys, Satyam and Tata Consultancy Services.

In terms of strategic platform partners, Cognos has relationships with Informatica, HP, IBM and Teradata, the latter of which it plans to pay special attention to very soon.

"We're in the process of refreshing this partnership and putting in more commitments," said Zeledon. "Rob [Ashe, Cognos' chief executive] is meeting the chief executive of Teradata later this month to renew our commitment and put more resources and go to market activities behind it."

Cognos also recognises the key role that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and local partners will play in its global growth ambitions.

"OEM partners are extremely important from a growth perspective and we've seen an explosion of interest from independent software vendors (ISVs). Were in the process of augmenting these programmes and implementing more globally," Zeledon added.

"Asia Pacific is important [in terms of local partnerships] and we're just starting to recruit the ecosystem we require to be successful in that territory."

Building on the knowledge base of its partners, the company has launched an initiative called 'Powered by Cognos' under which the two work together to create solutions to address multiple needs across multiple industries. At present, the programme has resulted in 110 solutions, but the aim is to increase this number to 1,000 over the next few years.

"Obviously Cognos is not going to do this itself," said Zeledon. "We can't create 1,000 different solutions and support and maintain 1,000 different solutions."

Going forward, the company will continue to embrace an ethos it has dubbed 'Select, engage, drive,' according to Zeledon.

"This has already been a huge differentiator and will continue to be. It's not just driven by technology, although we do believe we have the best technology. A good solution and a great partner to implement [it] is actually going to be the deciding factor for many customers," he said.

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