IBM Cognos ReportNet

Fact Sheet

Download PDF [147 KB]

IBM Cognos ReportNet™ is the first completely Web-based enterprise reporting solution to address all of your organization's reporting requirements. With IBM Cognos ReportNet, one reporting system can produce production reports such as invoices, statements, and statutory reports as well as the broad range of business reports that help everyone in your organization understand their operations better and make effective business decisions.

Its production reporting delivers pixel-perfect, high-quality reports to massive numbers of users. Its business reporting provides unprecedented flexibility for novice to advanced users to create complex reports with drag-and-drop simplicity.

Many organizations currently use multiple solutions to meet their reporting requirements. These solutions, which are most often deployed departmentally, must al be supported concurrently. As they strive to decrease their costs and the complexity of their reporting environment, IT managers have been looking for a single, Web-based reporting solution that can address all of their reporting needs. They require a flexible solution that leverages existing IT infrastructure, is truly scalable, and has the ability to grow. IBM Cognos ReportNet is that solution, covering all your reporting needs with one product. It dramatically brings down the total cost of ownership of enterprise reporting.

Bringing all reporting requirements together under one solution is a breakthrough in reporting software. Never before has reporting been this complete. IBM Cognos ReportNet takes this advantage even further. The software comes, out-of-the-box, with built-in capabilities that make simple departmental reporting easy, and complex global reporting simpler. Locale sensitivity and advanced multilingual capabilities make it easy to deploy reports in any language. Now global enterprises can bring divisions, departments, and country organizations together so they are all working from the same information.

Complementing these revolutionary capabilities, IBM Cognos ReportNet was built to be easy to use for everyone—from the first-time user to the advanced report author. With this Web-based software, you can broadly extend the power to create, distribute, and modify reports for everyone across your organization. IBM Cognos ReportNet is breakthrough reporting from the acknowledged industry leader in reporting and analysis. It delivers these key values:

• Unrivaled enterprise reporting coverage
• Streamlined creation, deployment and modification of reports
• Unparalleled openness, flexibility, and scalability.

UNRIVALED ENTERPRISE REPORTING COVERAGE

IBM Cognos ReportNet covers all reporting requirements from ad hoc query, managed reports, and business reports, to invoice, statements, and bills. A zero footprint Web-based deployment capability, for all report types, eliminates the need for IT to install and manage client desktop software. The easy-to-use interface ensures your users can access and work with the reports they require to be effective in their job.

• An intuitive, browser-based user interface enhances user adoption and improves their productivity
• Different interfaces and levels of report interaction are available to address the needs of all users—from novice to advanced
• Prompting and saved views allow personalization and customization of reports to suit individual needs.

• Comprehensive coverage of all types of reports—ad hoc queries, the authoring and delivery of managed reports to many users, focused business reports and now, batch-type production reporting
• Delivers all report formats:
• lists, cross tabs, charts, and multi-page statement layout
• Breakthrough multi-query compound reports and the ability to embed dynamic objects
• Conditional report layout adapts dynamically to the data content and end-user requirements
• Reports can draw on your organization's full range of data assets and heterogeneous data sources to deliver one version of the truth.

STREAMLINED CREATION, DEPLOYMENT, AND MODIFICATION OF REPORTS

IBM Cognos ReportNet moves reporting closer to the needs of everyday users and away from the requirement to understand database logic and computer languages. Reports are easy to create by dragging and dropping report data elements and report formatting onto a blank page. Simplifying report creation and modification for both professional IT and business authors helps extend authoring to a broad audience via the Web. The time needed to build and deploy simple or complex reports is dramatically reduced. By streamlining the creation, deployment, and modification of reports, IBM Cognos ReportNet dramatically decreases the demands on IT by alleviating the report creation and modification backlog.

The built-in, out-of-the-box multi-lingual capabilities mean reports can be built once and shared across many languages without the need for additional translation or formatting. Reporting that is this easy to use and administer can truly be extended across the global enterprise.

• IBM Cognos ReportNet's adaptive report authoring environment alleviates the rigid and time-consuming reporting authoring processes found in banded report authoring systems
• Easy and fast report and ad hoc query creation and modification with a flexible zone-based layout paradigm
• Advanced report design including:
• Multiple linked or independent queries per report
• Separation of presentation and query layers
• Logical layout page control and conditional formatting
• Sophisticated out-of-the-box prompting reduces the report modification backlog:
• Enables one report to service the information needs of many
• Users can control the report content with a range of context sensitive report prompts.

• A single authored report can be run in multiple languages, supported from a single metadata model
• Users can control and set their own preferences for the reporting interface, content language, and other geographic sensitivities (time, currency, date formats)
• Timely, personalized reports can be efficiently delivered around the world through report bursting. Bursting performs a single execution of a report, sections the report as required, and distributes the sections to the appropriate recipients based on report content
• Scheduled batch reporting jobs can be executed simultaneously or sequentially to multiple output formats and destinations
• Users and IT can schedule reports based on time, calendar, data availability, or other parameters
• Administrators and users can choose multiple delivery options-report consumers can access information as they need, or have reports pushed out to them as scheduled.

• The completely browser-based and zero footprint interface is intuitive to use and makes report distribution easy
• Users can create ad hoc reports over the Web with minimal training or IT involvement
• User-defined ad hoc information queries and business authored reports can be promoted to a professional authoring environment for further formatting and distribution
• Users can easily share their reports.

UNPARALLELED OPENNESS, FLEXIBILITY, AND SCALABILITY

IBM Cognos ReportNet easily integrates into your existing IT environment. Generate return from your IT investments by extending their capabilities with total enterprise reporting. Give your users breakthrough reporting capabilities while reducing and simplifying your IT reporting resource requirements, and lowering your cost of ownership.

IBM Cognos ReportNet fully leverages SAP BW's capabilities and infrastructure with full access to SAP data sources and the ability to integrate with SAP's portal and security environments. IBM Cognos ReportNet delivers the most complete reporting solution for SAP customers. IBM Cognos ReportNet delivers an open, Web standards-based reporting environment that enables organizations to take full advantage of their existing IT infrastructure and skills investments.

• IBM Cognos ReportNet works with your existing application and Web servers, portals, browsers, enterprise applications, platforms and databases
• Fully documented API for your IT to do customization and integration
• Customize the reporting interface and re-brand to suit your organization.

• Scalable to support hundreds of thousands of users
• Standards-based, Web architecture delivers enterprise-wide accessibility and 24/7 availability
• Designed for extreme scalability and robustness:
• N-tiered, multi-server, multi-threaded architecture
• Full failover recovery and dynamic load balancing
• Support for Windows and UNIX operating systems, including heterogeneous platform deployments.

• IBM Cognos ReportNet leverages your existing security infrastructure (such as LDAP, NTLM, Active Directory, Netegrity, SAP, Cognos namespace)
• Comes with an API to adapt to custom authentication provider models
• Simultaneous support for multiple security authentication providers
• Out-of-the-box encryption capabilities.

COGNOS REPORTNET: AN INTEGRAL PART OF COGNOS' COMPLETE BI SOLUTION

IBM Cognos ReportNet elevates Cognos' Enterprise Business Intelligence Solution to the next level with breakthrough reporting software. It is fully integrated with Cognos' scorecarding, dashboarding, analysis, event management and data integration capabilities. The result is the broadest and deepest BI solution from a single vendor.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Supported Environments