IBM Cognos Visualizer

Fact Sheet

Download PDF [88 KB]

IBM Cognos Visualizer dashboards take you beyond traditional analysis: highly intuitive graphic analyses let you quickly grasp trends in business performance and act on your insight.

DASHBOARDS
You don't have to look under the hood to see if your car needs gas or your engine is revving too high. Gauges on the dashboard tell you at a glance what’s running smoothly and what needs attention. Shouldn’t you be able to run your business the same way?

Business dashboards bring you rich and complex information in a simple, graphical format. Dashboards condense large volumes of information to show the big picture, or present multiple dimensions simultaneously to help you understand the data’s complexity.

Dashboards simplify complex data to speed up understanding and give you important warnings. Pictures can quickly show us the interrelationships among measures, and combining data not commonly combined can produce a revelation.

POWERFUL VISUAL ANALYSIS
IBM Cognos Visualizer provides powerful visual analysis to communicate complex business data quickly and intuitively. By going beyond simple pie or bar graphs, you can view and combine data in a way that lets you immediately see areas of concern, trends, limits surpassed, unmet quotas, and other indicators.

  • Dashboard views: When complex data is presented in a simple visual format at a summary level, you gain an immediate grasp of the trends and relationships most significant in your business performance data. IBM Cognos Visualizer accelerates the time it takes between getting information, understanding that information and, most importantly, acting on it.

  • Instant-impact visuals: IBM Cognos Visualizer brings business hot buttons to life graphically by letting you display your business data in virtually any presentation type: multiple 2D and 3D chart types, color-coded drillable maps, animated reports, and more. Maps need not be geographic. Automotive customers may use a customized car image to map warranty claims and spot quality issues. A government health agency could use a model human body to map the most common trauma injuries.

  • Aggregate displays: Letting you combine multiple, even disparate business measures in virtually any display type, IBM Cognos Visualizer lets you create meaningful cross-sections of your business. Viewing sister data from sales, inventory, and HR simultaneously, you may make a connection you may not have made by looking at the same data separately.

  • Business intelligence integration: IBM Cognos Visualizer populates dashboards using existing BI data sources-IBM Cognos PowerPlay multidimensional data, Excel spreadsheets, dBase files, flat files, and most relational databases. Drill through to supporting details in multidimensional and managed reports, and ad hoc queries.

  • Interactive exploration: Set your own thresholds and filter out unrelated data on the fly. Instantly drill through to reports for more detail. Zoom in on areas of interest and rotate the visual for a fresh perspective. Visit related Internet sites. In other words, view your business information in the way most meaningful to you.

  • Strategic communication: Your strategic initiatives may include Six Sigma, ISO Certification, Total Quality Management, or your own internal initiative. Follow and communicate their progress using IBM Cognos Visualizer's statistical charts that measure mean, median, standard deviation, percentiles, variation, and frequency distribution. Chart types include histogram, thermometer, control limits, and trend, all fully customizable with many options for color, animation, and layout.

  • Out-of-the-box authoring: Dashboard authoring is quick and easy, using the wide range of charting options. No custom coding is necessary.

COGNOS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE
Cognos, an IBM company, 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.
IBM COGNOS VISUALIZER TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Platform Requirements
  • Windows 95, 98, 2000, and NT
  • UNIX (IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris)
  • Pentium 133 or higher
  • 32 MB RAM (minimum)
  • 60 MB hard disk space
Browser Requirements
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator
  • 15 MB hard disk space
Supported Data Sources
  • Multidimensional PowerPlay PowerCubes™ as well as third-party OLAP cubes
  • All major RDBMS
  • Flat files
  • Excel files
Focus on Performance
Download our White Paper
Find out how Cognos BI can help improve the effectiveness of your Six Sigma initiatives.
Click here to see Cognos Visualizer features up close
Key features up close
Contact Sales