Blog: William McKnight

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Cognos Launches Cognos 8

On Wednesday, Cognos announced Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

BI has been focused very highly on the high-end, big-dollar deals, as evident by some of the titan mergers recently. However, many SMB needs are more basic than this. They would like a product that is easy to learn and also easy to use and manage.

The model of the BI software industry seems to be about delivering more and more complexity, making business harder instead of simpler.

Cognos 8 is a nice step towards something that reverses this direction and also provides a simplified approach for SMB. They have consolidated formerly separate Cognos products - ReportNet, PowerPlay, NoticeCast, Metrics Manager and DecisionStream ETL - into a single product on a single server built on a services-based architecture. And it's zero footprint.

I applaud this approach.

I also suggest this is further evidence of the standardization of business intelligence around a finite set of vendor frameworks.

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