IBM Cognos NoticeCast

Fact Sheet


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IBM Cognos NoticeCast lets your organization foster opportunities and stay ahead of potential concerns by automatically monitoring and delivering time-critical information to key decision-makers.

EVENT DETECTION

Important warnings can easily be hidden in day-to-day data. But sifting through reports for opportunities or concerns can be time-consuming, or worse—fruitless. Too often we receive the critical knowledge too late, and miss the boat.

With event detection software, you do not need to go looking for important information. It seeks you—right away, wherever you are, at any time of day if you wish. You define what is important for you to know. The sooner you find out, the sooner you can act, the more options you have, and the more valuable your action.

Event detection can be as simple as finding out that important new business intelligence (BI) has been issued: a report, a corporate performance management metric, a query. It can be as complex as finding out about a trend emerging across your customer base—a trend that could spell trouble or opportunity depending on how you handle it. It can be as immediate as finding out about a critical operational transaction minutes after it occurs, making business activity monitoring (BAM) possible.

IBM Cognos NoticeCast event detection software automatically and immediately alerts users—based on criteria they define—of critical events in their data. The alert messages arrive at the desktops, PDAs, or cell phones of key decision-makers within minutes of the event and can contain all the information they need to make a decision.

EVENT-DRIVEN BI FROM COGNOS

NoticeCast monitors three types of events.

  • Notification Events: Find out about new BI Content. Users decide what is important to them, and NoticeCast will alert them when key performance metrics are updated, reports issued, queries refreshed, or PowerPlay® cubes changed. The notification email message can contain an explanatory note, a URL, and relevant reports as attachments.

  • Performance Events: Manage your performance. If a performance metric or measure exceeds or falls below a user-defined threshold, such as a customer falling below a predetermined SLA ‘fill rate’, NoticeCast will instantly alert the appropriate decision-makers, wherever they are. Because performance measures can be based on actual or projected information, the system can evaluate whether a trend is a potential concern and project what might happen if no action is taken.

  • Operational Events: Keep abreast of operational issues. Decision-makers can monitor and manage business risks and opportunities as they arise in the operational or transactional data. Perhaps a customer has placed an order containing out-of-stock items. NoticeCast immediately flags the problem and alerts the people who can work quickly to make the items available, heading off customer dissatisfaction at the source. The Operational event allows BAM by enforcing zero latency of information.

FROM INFORMATION SHARING TO EVENT MANAGEMENT

NoticeCast email alerts disseminate valuable, time-critical information, uniting employees from across departments or locations through event-focused information.

  • Flexible Delivery Methods: Send messages to wired or wireless devices. Define the material to accompany the message and determine the recipient list. Match delivery to recipients’ calendars to ensure they receive messages immediately, whether at work, at home, or on the road.

  • Suppression of Duplicate Messages: When an event condition continues but does not change, users do not generally need to receive multiple alerts. At best this can be annoying; at worst, misleading. Users can set rules to prevent duplicate messages.

  • Single-Event, Multiple-Alert Messages: One event can result in different messages being generated for different recipient groups. A sales manager might require only summary sales information, while a sales representative might need full detail, and an inventory manager might only be interested in the event from a stock perspective.

  • User-oriented solution: Users can author their own event-detection criteria—without calling upon IT resources.

  • Guided Analysis: You’ve seen the alert, but you need to know more. NoticeCast automatically places links in the message back to source information in reports or queries. When you click to see these reports, your exploration is “guided” by the context of the event—in other words, filtered through event values such as a customer, a product, or an order number.

  • Event Management: So you know more; now you need to start managing. Use the prompts in the message to invoke any of a wide range of applications that let you act on your knowledge. Communicate decisions with an email pre-populated with event information, place a product order or make an enquiry through a pre-populated transaction screen, or other necessary follow-ups.

  • Write data to a RDBMS: Using values from the event, you can carry out interactions with a target database, such as inserting or updating records. Email alerts contain actionable information and links to help you explore the event further.

COGNOS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE

Cognos business intelligence (BI) delivers the information framework that lets anyone in your organization understand your corporate performance—from any angle and to any depth. It lets you communicate the results—whether business as usual or breakthrough insight. It can even notify you if a critical event occurs, wherever you may be.

Build a solution using Cognos BI components or purchase a pre-built solution. Either way, ease of use and deployment, combined with user self-service, means you’re up and running quickly and seeing ROI faster than you imagined. All Cognos BI components feature:

  • Centralized security: A single LDAP-based component delivers seamless, secure access for all users inside and outside the firewall in conjunction with your own user authentication and security systems. IT can manage user profiles and classes for all Cognos components through centralized SSL security.

  • Zero-footprint web deployment: Users access information in pure html using their web browser, making Java applets or proprietary plug-ins unnecessary. Share strategic information over a secure extranet with partners, suppliers, customers, and a mobile sales force with the bandwidth-saving benefit of a stateless environment.

  • Scalability: Cognos BI has been tested and proven scalable to tens of thousands of users through load balancing and a distributed architecture supporting Unix and Windows.

  • Central administration: Manage all BI applications from one central console, or distribute management among departments or locations. Control request processing at the server, application, PowerCube, and report level. Monitor throughput across multiple servers at a glance and fine-tune multi-server environments. The platform-independent, remote Java administrator program lets you administer any server from any machine.

  • Shared metadata: Create and manage all BI metadata and business rules in a single metadata model based on shared dimensions. This model provides a consistent enterprise data view with minimum development effort. The SQL-based environment ensures the metadata is optimized for each BI application.

  • Extensible BI: Using our open API based on a web services architecture, IT can integrate BI directly into third party portals or specialized web applications. The software’s shared data foundation and integrated, modular approach means it can be easily implemented in steps across the entire enterprise. It can grow as the business grows, while reusing existing technology investments to save on costs.

  • Local language, local currency: Localized product versions let users work in their own language and view figures in their own currency, using regional settings—all from a single application server.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Packaging

  • IBM Cognos NoticeCast includes NoticeCast Server, portal, and security.
  • When the IBM Cognos NoticeCast Server is installed with an existing Cognos deployment, the alert and notification authoring options are activated with existing deployments of IBM Cognos PowerPlay® Web, IBM Cognos Query, IWR, and the Cognos BI portal.
  • IBM Cognos NoticeCast is available for Windows and UNIX.
  • The Windows package includes: IBM Cognos NoticeCast Server that can be installed on NT, Windows 2000, and XP.
  • The UNIX package includes: IBM Cognos NoticeCast Server that can be installed on any of three supported UNIX environments (HP/UX, AIX, Sun Solaris).
Browsers, Web Servers
  • Browser access to IBM Cognos PowerPlay®, IBM Cognos Query and IBM Cognos NoticeCast SQL alerts, and to all notifications, is through the Cognos BI portal.
SMTP Mail server
  • NoticeCast requires access to a SMTP mail server.