INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Business Intelligence Goes Mobile: An Interview with Jim Balsillie

October 30, 2006

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On September 25, Cognos previewed Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, a new BI solution that enables users to access and work with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence content over their BlackBerry® devices. The rich client is the result of a strategic partnership between Cognos and Research in Motion, creators of the popular BlackBerry®. Prior to the announcement, Cognos Senior Manager John Blackmore spoke with Jim Balsillie, RIM's Chairman and Co-CEO, about the value of BI to BlackBerry® users.

The growing wireless market

Cognos: Most people are familiar with the BlackBerry®. If they don't own one, they've definitely seen one in use. Jim, give us a sense of scale: how has the wireless message market grown since you introduced the BlackBerry® in 1999?

RIM: "Around 6 million people have BlackBerries®, and we have about 80,000 servers installed in different organizations around the world. It's definitely grown tremendously – close to on hundred percent growth every year on a compounded basis. It's very exciting market."

Business intelligence a "natural" for BlackBerry® users

Cognos: BlackBerry® users quickly find them indispensable. There's a actually a great quote on your Web site from a journalist who declares, "That's right, I'm in love with their BlackBerry®." How do you see business intelligence reports and scorecards on those BlackBerries taking that "must-have" quality to another level?

RIM: "I think it's a natural. Of our 80,000 servers, almost two-thirds use applications beyond email and voice on their BlackBerries®, so people have already discovered this capability. Business intelligence is a natural."

At the core, what we offer is access. It's much more about an access, event-driven relationship. We've seen that in messaging, where you take a session pull environment like email and make it sessionless push, you take orders of magnitude out of the latency of collaboration. The same opportunity exists for virtually all time-sensitive corporate applications, and none is greater than BI."

Rich data presentation

Cognos: When you talk about access, you have offered that access to business intelligence on the BlackBerry® before. What's new or different with this announcement?

RIM: "Definitely Cognos has been very aggressive and creative and innovative in the wireless space. Existing BI approaches tend to be more browser-based and that's definitely a key start. But Cognos is really pushing it to the next level with a richer client experience, where you have rich rendering of how you want the data presented, you have very easy drill-down, you have online/offline capabilities, with a lot of caching.

"When people get business intelligence data, especially dynamic, they're looking to react to it – so having all kinds of associative data and event-driven data and drill-down capabilities, and richer presentation, better supports that decision-making process."

Cognos: So you can actually manipulate your business intelligence reports using the thumb wheel?

RIM: "It's remarkable. you can absolutely look at the data, you can present it the way you like, it, you can drill down dynamically, you can see if one area is performing well and others not, try to figure out why, you can save up historical data to compare, to have comparables."

"So much of data becomes data when it's put in a richer context. So its' about having the online, real-time data, but also giving it all the context that makes it so valuable."

Killer apps: monitoring sales and marketing performance

Cognos: With this more dynamic business intelligence that you'll be able to offer, what do you think would be some of the killer applications for this type of reporting?

RIM: "It's as broad as there are areas of dynamic business intelligence. The low-hanging fruit is sales performance and marketing program performance, where you look at key indicators of how programs are performing, and how sales regions, products, or people are performing, and you can drill down and get comparables, or context on that to see if there's a problem or a bigger opportunity."

"But also there's all other kinds of business intelligence, where it's very dynamic, very real-time, operations, metrics for services, production performance and uptime, facilities in the field, capacity, and response times. Really anything that has a dynamic operating performance element to it just lends itself so naturally to extending that information to an event-driven, wireless push architecture."

Productivity gains

Cognos: A word you always come back to is "access." People-to-people communication. How do you see this new element – the business – reaching out and communicating with you in its language of reports and metrics?

RIM: "It's pretty important, because most studies on efficiency will tell you that the overwhelming opportunity for greater business efficiency is in the management area and that's where you can have much greater productivity. It's fundamentally about information, and decisions, and responsiveness. So it's an overwhelming opportunity to really make organizations much more online, much more real time, much more responsive."

"The reality of business today is that people are mobile. Teams collaborate much more and synthesize all kinds of new information and dynamics. So how does a company get information, disseminate information, and collaborate? It's really by having some form of online collaboration and information alerting and sharing architectures. And definitely an integrated BI system plays naturally in unlocking that competitive advantage and productivity."