New IBM Cognos Software To Help More Employees Make Better, Faster Decisions

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new software capability that will allow performance management information -- which links strategy and corporate objectives for the best use of company resources -- to help more employees make faster and more informed business decisions.
This news is part of a bigger announcement made earlier today featuring an array of new and enhanced joint IBM-Cognos solutions, products and services from across the company that enable organizations of all sizes to gain better insights from their data.

This new capability in IBM Dashboard Accelerator software will help companies extract business data and present it in new, different and more meaningful contexts through their IBM WebSphere Portal applications.
The new feature is called Cognos “builder” because the data is obtained from reports generated by the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) tool. Cognos 8 BI delivers a complete range of analytical capabilities on a single, service-oriented architecture. It helps companies author, share, and use reports that draw on data across all of the organization’s sources.

IBM Dashboard Accelerator is a relatively new IBM software tool used for rapidly building a dashboard, which is an intuitive visualization of information customized to a specific job role or point of view. A portal is a technology for providing external and internal Web sites which can deliver personalized information, applications, and processes.

With diverse data sources and inefficient, time-consuming processes needed to turn data into useful information, more companies are turning to dashboards. IBM Dashboard Accelerator helps organizations build customized dashboards according to people’s jobs or tasks that assemble information from a range of different sources and present it through real-time, easy-to-read views. It also provides alert and tools to help users take action before issues become critical.

The new builder capability in IBM Dashboard Accelerator will allow millions of WebSphere Portal customers to leverage composite applications that can combine granular Cognos content together with other applications and feeds, at a lower cost of ownership.

“This is one of the first results of the Cognos acquisition we completed last week" said Larry Bowden, vice president, IBM Portals. “This is a great example of our Information on Demand business -- how IBM provides customers with the information they need when they need it and in context to their specific job roles.” The new Cognos builder can be tested now at https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/cc/earlyprograms/lotus/aiv6beta/

IBM currently plans to make it generally available by the end of March.
IBM Dashboard Accelerator with the new Cognos “builder” feature is planned to also:

* Allow performance management information from Cognos to be expanded for use by hundreds of millions of existing WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime users. Other collaboration software product users can benefit as well.

* Offer a rapid way for customers to integrate Cognos data with WebSphere Portal applications using a unified toolset.

* Help companies build composite WebSphere Portal applications that aggregate multiple data sources in a single intuitive Web 2.0 user interface.

* Integrate Cognos data with the key features of WebSphere Portal, including ‘click2action,’ portlet-to-portlet communication, single sign-on, personalization, support for portal access privileges, roles and groups, administrative and deployment flexibility.

* Eliminate the requirement to write any Java code. This significantly reduces the required development skills, time and cost to build customized dashboards. IBM also today announced several other joint IBM-Cognos products, solutions and services providing an integrated approach to using information for competitive advantage. With the addition of Cognos, IBM has become the leading provider of technology and services for business intelligence and performance management. The IBM WebSphere Portal business is part of the IBM Lotus software portfolio. Cognos is part of IBM’s Information Management division. For more information about the combination of IBM and Cognos see http://www.ibm.com/software/data/info/cognos.

For more information about IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, go to: http: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/information-on-demand/. For more information about IBM Dashboard Accelerator and six other related offerings which were announced in April 2007, click here.

For additional details about the other products and solutions announced today visit www.ibm.com/press.

To help clients understand how enterprise portals and dashboards can help further company business intelligence initiatives, IBM will sponsor a free webinar on February 19 at 1:00 pm ET, featuring David Gootzit of IT analyst firm Gartner. To register in advance, visit www.ibm.com/software/lotus/paradise.