IBM Cognos Now! Operational Business Intelligence

Streaming Server

The IBM Cognos Now! Streaming Server is a highly scalable, memory-based application that continuously integrates operational and historical data while providing rich analytical capabilities.

It processes typical business transactions such as new orders, customer service calls, and inventory status, and integrates that information with contextual data to form dynamic business views that are automatically updated as new transactions are processed.

Patent-pending data flow engine

Driving the Streaming Server is a patent-pending streaming data flow engine that combines high-speed data streaming with dynamic analysis and modeling.

The data flow engine also maintains and caches "temporal data sets" for time series analysis. Fast-changing data, such as moving averages and other statistical computations, are collected into views against which time-based business models and rules are easily applied.

This unique capability enables continuous analysis of data that changes over time, which is useful for managing day-to-day business operations and quickly detecting trends.

The Streaming Server includes:

• Connectivity agents for accessing enterprise data sources.
• Powerful data integration capabilities.
• A robust analytical engine that stores aggregate and detailed data for analytical processing.
• A powerful business rules and alerting engine used to detect and notify exceptions relating to key events or trends in operational data.
• Availability and recovery features to protect data in the event of a system failure.

Connectivity agents

Connectivity agents link the Streaming Server to various enterprise data sources. Agents fall into 3 categories:

1. File and database agents: support reading of flat files, CSV files, XML documents, and most relational databases. These agents can be configured to read incremental data based on timestamps or other criteria.



2. Message-oriented agents: can receive or have messages/events pushed to the Streaming Server from message oriented middleware. Supported formats include JMS, TIBCO, and MQ series.



3. Enterprise application agents: enable access to enterprise application data such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Oracle applications, and others.

Data integration

With its powerful data integration capabilities, the Streaming Server can pull data from multiple sources, integrate it on the fly, and aggregate it into data views and multi-dimensional cubes. Specific data integration capabilities include:

• Joining disparate sources
• Scrubbing (string, numeric functions)
• Aggregation (numerous aggregation and statistical functions)
• If-then-else processing
• Case processing

As new data streams through the Streaming Server it is continuously integrated and used to incrementally update all views and cubes, without additional latency.

Analytical engine

In addition to continuously processing operational data, the Streaming Server includes a highly scalable memory-resident engine that stores aggregate and detailed data for analytical processing.

The analytical engine also supports full transaction level recovery as well as the ability to persist data to a relational database. This enables the accumulation of data sets that can be used for historical and trend analysis.

Business rules and alert engine

The Streaming Server includes a powerful business rules engine that is used to detect and notify exceptions relating to key events or trends in operational data.

Business rules can be configured to continuously monitor data and generate alerts to notify dashboard users of exception conditions.

Business rules can be simple if-then conditions or very complex chained rules. The rules engine also supports temporal rules. For example: alert only if a rule holds true for a period of time.

Rules can be set and reset at run time and do not require a shutdown/restart to make them effective.

Alerts can be generated whenever an exception is detected. An alert usually contains several pieces of information that tell the receiver under what conditions the alert was generated.

An embedded report can be included in the alert to provide detailed contextual information to the end user. Alerts can also be used to initiate tasks or workflow for further analysis or issue resolution.

Workflows can be initiated in external process management tools (BPM) or operational applications using a SOA/Web Services interface.

Availability and recoverability

A recovery option allows for data to be restored in the event of a system failure. Turning recovery "on" causes the Streaming Server to continuously update recovery files with change log information.

In the event of system failure, a full recovery can be performed including transactions in process at the time of the failure.

High availability can also be ensured using persisted metadata and recovery files. By initiating a backup instance of the Streaming Server using stored metadata and recovery files, the system can recovered and fully operational usually within minutes.

Additional Resources:

IBM Cognos Now! Demo

Online Demo

See how users build and edit their own dashboards quickly and easily.

'Operational BI: Getting Real-time About Performance' by Aberdeen research

Research Report

Companies are trying to improve efficiencies and performance of may day-to-day and real-time activities, such as customer interactions, finance and accounting processes, transportation/shipping, sales activity, manufacturing, inventory management Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and marketing. This research report from Aberdeen Group provides a roadmap for the strategies and capabilities that Best-in-Class companies are employing to improve operational performance.

Operational Business Intelligence: Providing decision-makers with up-to-date visibility into operations

White Paper

Learn: Use cases for operational BI; The difference between enterprise BI and operational BI; Criteria for a successful operational BI deployment.

Manufacturing Quality Assurance with IBM Cognos Now! Monitor White Paper

White Paper

Find out how operational performance management with Cognos can improve efficiency, quality, and profitability in your organization.

Operational Business Intelligence: Assessing Market Treands and the Use of BI in Operations

White Paper

An issue paper by Ventana Research substantiates the view that operational BI is an important tool for performance management; companies that adopt it can expect to become more effective in key areas of operations.

Business Intelligence for Midsize Organizations featuring Gartner research

Analyst Report

Case studies of midsize organizations using Cognos software as a foundation for Performance Management. Featuring research from Gartner and Cognos into what midsize organizations needs are to make better business decisions with limited resources and budget.

Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership for Business Intelligence in Mid-Size Companies

Analyst Report

A Ventana Research white paper

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