What is it?
Business intelligence tools deliver information drawn from
corporate data to decision makers. Over the years, the definition
of a decision maker has widened, from the Management and Executive
Information Systems (MIS and EIS) of the 1980s and early 1990s, to
include just about anyone in the organisation.
Cognos is among the leaders in providing easily deployable
browser-based business intelligence access.
Cognos has widened its range from query and reporting tools to
provide a complete suite of tools for building datawarehouses. It
also offers enterprise planning and forecasting and business
metrics suites.
As well as having its own direct salesforce, Cognos sells through
partners, including global consultancies, systems integrators and
providers of industry-specific applications.
Cognos has continued to perform strongly at a time when IT spending
has been constrained, winning 10 major contracts in the third
quarter of the last financial year.
Where did it originate?
Quasar, the company that became Cognos, was founded in 1969. Quasar
supplied a query tool called Quiz for the HP 3000 server. The
company's background was in consultancy and bespoke systems. The
Cognos software products division was formed in 1979.
What's it for?
The Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence suite includes
extraction, transformation and loading capabilities to pull data
together from disparate sources and make it available in a
datawarehouse; Olap (online analytical processing) tools for
pulling the data out; and visualisation software (graphics) for
making complex data easier to understand.
What makes it special?
Cognos is a market leader in the business intelligence sector, the
company is very well established and it has a large customer base,
providing plenty of opportunities for IT professionals with Cognos
skills.
However, Forrester Research analyst Nate Root said that although
Cognos software "runs the gamut of business intelligence platform
functionality", it is "merely adequate" in advanced disciplines
such as data mining.
How difficult is it to master?
Root warned that although suppliers use the same language to
describe the functionality of query, reporting and Olap tools, the
skills are not transferable. "As a result, each business
intelligence package requires unique training, development and IT
support," he said.
In addition, the sheer size of the Cognos business intelligence
suite - Impromptu and Powerplay for query and reporting,
Decisionstream for datawarehousing, among others - means you have
to specialise.
Where is it used?
According to Cognos, it has more than 22,000 users in 135
countries, across most industry sectors. These include Hyundai,
Geest, Royal Doulton, Greene King, National Grid, Allied Domecq,
Bupa, and many universities, hospitals and NHS Trusts.
What systems does it run on?
Windows NT, 2000 and 98; Solaris, HP-UX 11i and IBM AIX 5;
Teradata, IBM DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase
and ODBC relational data stores; and third-party Olap sources
including Microsoft, SAP BW, Hyperion Essbase and IBM DB2 Olap.
What's coming up?
Cognos Reportnet, a Soap- (Simple Object Access Protocol) and
XML-based web services product aimed at extending communities of
users outside enterprise boundaries.
Training
You will need to take a series of expensive courses to become a
specialist in any Cognos tool. Details are available on the
supplier's website.
www.cognos.com/uk
Rates of pay
Cognos developers can expect a salary in the region of £30,000, but
you will probably also need SQL and RDBMS skills. Salaries for
datawarehouse developers start at £40,000+. Consultants and
business analysts earn £50,000-£60,000 or more.