IBM Pops Open Cognos 10 and Its Fizzes
October 28, 2010
October 29, 2010 — I don’t know about you, but I have been hearing about Cognos for a long time. I understand that it slices, dices, and makes IBM sales engineers giddy with hardware upgrades, software add ons, and consulting services. The most recent news barrage about Cognos (a name I like by the way) strikes me as more autumn public relations fizz than rare earth material. Information Week, ever mindful of the precepts of How to Win Friends and Influence People, revealed:
IBM has packed a lot into the IBM Cognos 10 release it announced Monday, pulling software from SPSS and Lotus into the suite while also upgrading the usability, manageability and performance of the total platform.
The recipe strikes me as “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” The challenge in my opinion is integrating some odds and ends like Lotus collaboration into SPSS number and text crunching. Wrap these functions inside of Cognos and the overall package has quite a few moving parts.
“IBM Cognos 10 Expands BI Boundaries” said [link may go dark]:
Another big push at IBM has been collaboration. That’s something BI vendors like Lyzasoft and SAP BusinessObjects, with its cloud-based StreamWork offering, are already pursuing. The idea is to let BI practitioners share and brainstorm around insights and analyses to improve interpretations of results and advance analyses. Rather than starting from square one, IBM has embedded collaboration capabilities from Lotus Connections right into Cognos 10. Working from familiar Cognos interfaces, users post messages, initiate discussions, post documents and reviews, tap into decision networks, and add comments and annotations on individual data points. When collaborators with appropriate privileges open the same reports, they see the comments and requests for feedback.
The lousy economy has been a boon for some data analytics companies. But raw horsepower embodied in traditional on premises solutions with an aging grandmother like Lotus collaboration functions is not too exciting to me and the goslings. We think that next generation systems from outfits as diverse as i2 Ltd., Megaputer, Digital Reasoning, and others is where the action is.
But we are not commissioned on our IBM sales and service upsells. Complexity, in our opinion, is engineered into IBM’s most recent Cognos bundle.
Stephen E Arnold
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2 Responses to “IBM Pops Open Cognos 10 and Its Fizzes”
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“Something old….something Big Blue” surely?
I wonder what search functionality there is in Cognos: maybe it’s Xapian
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-xapianomega/
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for you commentary and perspective. I was wondering, why do you say that Lotus Connections is an “aging grandmother”? Lotus Connections just had its 3rd birthday and is considered by Gartner to be a leader in the Social Software space and according to IDC has the largest marketshare in the social platform space worldwide.
Would love to hear more!
Thanks again,
-Luis