IBM Cognos acquisition bears fruit

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IBM has unveiled its expanded business strategy and roadmap following its acquisition last year of business intelligence (BI) software vendor Cognos for $5 billion (£2.6 billion).

It announced its updated Information on Demand business strategy based on new and enhanced joint products it said would enable organisations to gain better insights from their data, improve decision making and optimise business performance.

There are 10 new products for banking, retail, healthcare, government, life sciences and manufacturing industries, including six pre-integrated offerings designed extend BI functionality into the management of overall business performance for competitive advantage in response to changing market demands.

The IBM Retail Integration Framework, for example, now incorporates store operations and planning blueprints from Cognos that have been pre-integrated with IBM retail data models.

And a new IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control offering makes a secure content repository, records management, content and email archiving and classification capabilities available in combination with IBM's collaboration and messaging, Tivoli and Lotus software and storage hardware. IBM said Cognos technology features here are used for monitoring, reporting and analysing compliance-related content and processes.

The introduction of Cognos 8 BI 'starter pack' for IBM InfoSphere Warehouse and distribution of InfoSphere Warehouse with Cognos 8 BI solutions are designed to accelerate the data and metadata integration and quality processes of BI data warehousing projects, using pre-integration of Cognos 8 with the IBM Information Server software platform.

Pre-configured templates for integrating Cognos 8 BI with IBM FileNet Business Process Management (BPM) software, will allow customers to use Cognos 8 BI reports and analytics. And pre-integration and bundling of an IBM Dashboard Accelerator 'starter kit' with Cognos 8 will enable quick portal-based dashboard building.

For small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs), IBM will bundle Cognos 8 BI software with its 'C-Class Balanced' data warehouse software, server and storage technologies for integrating and maintaining multiple data and information resources.

In addition, it has extended it services portfolio, creating an Information on Demand Infrastructure services arm, which will offer BI planning, design and deployment capabilities gained from Cognos.

Steve Mills, IBM Software Group senior vice president and group executive said that thanks to its existing partnership with Cognos, prior to its acquisition last November, these new products and services take a common approach to open standards and complementary portfolios. "We're hitting the ground running," he added.

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