Cognos 8: Blurring Business Intelligence and Search
October 4, 2008
The death of enterprise search and the wobblies pulling down content management systems (CMS) are not well understood by licensees–yet. In the months going forward, the growing financial challenges in North America and Western Europe will take a toll on spending for information technology. The strong interest (based on my analysis of the clicks on the articles on this Web site) suggest that some folks are thinking hard about the utility of open source search systems and lower-cost alternatives to the seven figure price tags on some of the high profile search systems. I can’t mention these firms by name. My attorney is no fun at all. You can identify these vendors by going to almost any Web search system and keying the phrase “enterprise search” or “information access”. You can figure out the rest of the information from these results pages.
IBM baffles me. The company offers more information products and services than any other firm I track. Each year I try to sort out the product and service names. This year I noticed this information buried deep in one of the news stories about the new version of Cognos 8. My source is here,
My hunch is that IBM is creating a new map for business intelligence. On that map, IBM will point out the big X where the real high value payoff may be found. Here’s the pertinent passage from the IBM Cognos news release:
IBM’s recent CEO and CIO surveys have found unstructured corporate information such as user files, customer comments, medical images, Web and rich media content to be growing at 63%. The explosive growth of this type of business information has pushed the convergence of the BI and Search categories. It has created demand for new BI search capabilities to provide quick and easy access to both ranked and relevant BI content and unstructured information. Newly updated, IBM Cognos 8 Go! Search v4 lets any business user extend the decision-making capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI by securely accessing and dynamically creating BI content using simple key-word search criteria. The software works with popular enterprise search applications such as IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition, Google, Yahoo and Autonomy so users can see structured, trusted BI content and unstructured data such as Word documents and PDF’s in the same view within a familiar interface. Users can search all fully-indexed metadata as well as titles and descriptions within a report. Search-assisted authoring and exploration gives them options to refine queries or analyze data cubes based on search terms. These capabilities speed access to the most relevant business information regardless of naming similarities between reports, helps business users quickly refine queries as required and frees IT from constantly re-creating commonly used reports. This leaves IT with more time for strategic business initiatives. The software is completely integrated with the web-based administration and security parameters set by IT administrators for IBM Cognos 8 BI. This integration provides a centralized, efficient approach to administration and security and effectively addresses two common areas of concern for resource-constrained IT departments, who want to provide more autonomy to business users, but need a single administration point and assurance that corporate authentication policies will be maintained. ‘These new enhancements to our Go! Portfolio provide business-driven performance information to help each area of the organization strategically manage the information that is most pertinent to them,’ said Leah MacMillan, vice president, product marketing, Cognos, an IBM Company. ‘Both the business and IT gain more autonomy whether employees are in the office searching, monitoring and analyzing business outcomes or on the road looking for new business updates or geographically relevant information.’ The IBM Cognos 8 Go! Portfolio of software is a key component of IBM’s Information Agenda, a new approach consisting of industry-specific software and consulting services geared to helping customers use information as a strategic asset across their businesses. [Emphasis added]
Let me deconstruct this passage using my addled goose methods.
First, Cognos 8 can crunch both structured and unstructured information. The reason is that business intelligence and search are converging. This is a popular way to express the fact that users want information from one system. I don’t want to run one query for structured and then run another query on a different system for unstructured information. I have to merge to two, and I don’t have the time for this work plus I don’t like to do it. But the larger point is that IBM says that business intelligence and search are converging. Other companies like Attivio have been saying the same thing this year, but IBM has more marketing horsepower than Attivio does.
Second, Cognos 8 can work with “enterprise search applications”–not systems, applications. The gist of this for me is that Cognos 8 can tap into existing indexing and retrieval systems. Search systems if present are placed under the umbrella of a higher value and implicitly more important function. Search is a loser, which may be going beyond IBM’s intent, but this is a Web log, and I see “search is a loser” written between the lines of this quoted passage. Feel free to disagree.
Third, Cognos 8 performs a spider in the center of a Web role. Cognos 8’s administrative tools bring order to the information under its umbrella. Good news for the Cognos 8 system administrator, technical staff, and business analysts. Not such good news is this statement for the search system administrator, the procurement team responsible for a system up to two thirds of its users find dissatisfying to some degree, and technical team responsible for keeping the search system alive and online.
Fourth, IBM creates one of its “here today, gone tomorrow” product names. This one borrows from a popular Microsoft buzzword. Instead of the Microsoft agenda, IBM crafts the “information agenda”. What’s on the information agenda? High value products with search either tossed in as a utility of a secondary, maybe tertiary, function to the amphetamine-charged Cognos 8 “super system”.
Has anyone other than my team in Harrods Creek, Kentucky, paid much attention to this demotion of search? I don’t think that anyone has mounted this donkey as of October 3, 2008, and 7 pm Eastern time. The goose may be wrong. What’s new?
Which Is this your search or content management vendor?
Why do I care?
IBM’s clout in large companies is significant. Furthermore the blue chip consulting firms, the independent IBM experts, and the legions of IBM certified partners will probably pick up this theme in the next few months. I think there are several high probability outcomes if this message demonstrates stickiness:
- Search, content processing, and text analytics vendors will become business intelligence companies, specialists, or some other flavor of intelligence vendor. Attensity, a company that cut its teeth in the “real” intelligence community, is on this path now. You can learn more about Attensity here. It’s marketing jargon is formidable, but the company is pushing business intelligence, not text analytics.
- Studies of enterprise search, content processing, and text processing aren’t selling as briskly as business intelligence and related studies. I see my royalty checks. My Google studies continue to generate cash. The search royalties are drifting downward. Martin White and I have a new study focused on making existing enterprise search deployments successful. We have written a management handbook, not an encyclopedia of vendors with search on offer. We think management is now the major challenge in existing search deployments, not technology. Martin and I will know if we are correct when the handbook comes out prior to the London online meeting in December.
- Content management systems are being asked to support business intelligence. Many CMS vendors owe their existence to people who knew zero about coding for Web sites. Now that alternative tools are available at a fraction of the cost of the flagship systems from Documentum, Interwoven, and Vignette, CMS vendors will morph like Dr. Jekyll (CMS) into Mr. Hyde (CMS as a business intelligence platform). I get scared just thinking about figuring out how to make that work.
- Serious business intelligence companies swinging into action to bundle search and content processing into more of their offerings. The traditional big dogs like Business Objects, Cognos, SAS, and SPSS have to hustle. Cloud based services could cut off these firms’ sales in small and mid sized businesses. Forced to raise prices to the blue chip customers, some of these Fortune 1000 outfits may find that cloud based business intelligence is “good enough” and orders of magnitude less expensive. In a financial flame out, who wants to pick nits over the effectiveness of next generation statistical routines. Most outfits just want to survive and cut software and support costs.
To wrap up, the Cognos 8 announcement may signal some larger changes in the search, CMS, and business intelligence markets. I think this is a happy post. Opportunities abound, but I don’t think the largest incumbents will be the beneficiaries. Agree? Disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2008
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