Cognos launches BI solutions as hardware appliance and SaaS


– Cognos Now! brings fast and low-cost BI alternative to enterprise departments or mid-size organisations –


Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions, has announced Cognos Now!. It is the first offering in a new family of BI and performance management solutions available as hardware appliances and through the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Cognos Now! is a complete BI solution, packaged in a single hardware appliance, that can be installed in less than an hour. The industry’s first BI appliance, Cognos Now! includes the preconfigured hardware server, the BI application and all other necessary software for a fixed price, regardless of the number of users, dashboards or data sources. It is based on technology from the recent Celequest acquisition.

Cognos Now! is also offered as a hosted service and is called Cognos Now! for Salesforce. This is designed for companies which need to monitor performance against their salesforce data.

Cognos Now! enables organisations to easily deploy and maintain a complete, operational BI solution at a low cost. It will particularly benefit small and mid-market companies that lack the IT resources and budget to install, deploy and maintain software solutions. The solution’s self-service dashboards enable business users across an organisation to personalise and change views without any additional training or IT involvement. It has a scalable architecture, so can support vast numbers of users, data sources and dashboards on a single appliance, requiring minimal maintenance.

With interactive, self-service operational dashboards and real-time information monitoring, Cognos Now! allows enterprise departments and small to mid-size companies to proactively track, monitor and respond to critical data immediately. With continuously up-to-date business visibility, customers can improve the management of day-to-day organisational activities.

“As manager of one of the world’s largest energy markets, the Midwest ISO deals with a huge volume of data,” said Anushree Bag, manager of performance assurance with Midwest ISO. “Cognos Now! enables us to better track, analyse and instantly react to changing conditions, all in a complete BI solution that was more economical than other products."

“Our vision is to help our customers drive business performance and Cognos Now! is an exciting offering that will help our customers achieve even greater success,” said Diaz Nesamoney, vice president and general manager of on-demand solutions at Cognos. “Companies of all sizes need to be aware of and able to respond to changing business conditions in order to succeed. With Cognos Now!, we are able to offer robust, operational BI solutions that allow more companies to easily and cost-effectively harness the value hidden in their business data.”

Operational BI solutions deployed on Cognos Now! appliances are immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, delivering a complete view of enterprise information and further extending the value of the Cognos performance management framework.

Cognos Now! is available immediately as a hardware appliance or hosted service. There are three appliance editions - SMB, Standard, and Enterprise - with different processor and memory configurations to address a range of customer performance and scale requirements.

About Cognos, an IBM Company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions.

It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.
Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008.

For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com/uk/

For further information about Cognos, please contact:
Katy Lyons or Farimah Saadat at LEWIS, the PR agency

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7802 2626
Fax: +44 (0)20 7802 2627
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For sales enquiries call:
Tel: +44 (0) 1344 486 668
www.cognos.com/uk