Strengths and Cautions - IBM Cognos

IBM (Cognos)

Strengths

•IBM (Cognos) offers a combination of CPM applications and BI platform capabilities that enables it to compete effectively in enterprise-level CPM deals. One of the initial BI vendors to venture into the CPM market, IBM (Cognos) has remained a leader, owing to its core strengths in BP&F (which still drives most CPM deals) and strategy management, and has maintained a strong market presence. Its Controller product for financial consolidation continues to gain ground, and these solutions are all integrated with its underlying BI platform. This gives IBM (Cognos) greater opportunity to cross-sell to existing BI and CPM customers.

•IBM (Cognos) has done a good job of extending its CPM functionality through "blueprints" that Cognos' licensed users can download free of charge; however, these are not complete applications, and there is no applications support for these "blueprints." These are developed through its Innovation Center for Performance Management (involving partners where appropriate), and gives IBM (Cognos) vertical and functional capabilities outside core CPM applications. Its relationship to IBM Global Business Services (GBS) extends the use of Cognos' blueprints, and may eventually lead to verticalizations of its CPM products. For example, a new Banking Risk Performance application and a Strategic Investment Management Blueprint have recently been developed by IBM (Cognos) and GBS. Moreover, the integration of Cognos into the broad IBM portfolio and a greater focus by IBM's consulting force will help to drive greater adoption of Cognos. Since acquisition, IBM has invested significantly in new hires for this segment in sales, development and services areas. This helps Cognos to deliver its broader PM vision.

•IBM (Cognos) is further enhancing its financial-reporting tools with a solution that will address the unique requirements for financial and management reporting, and is designed for business users, rather than for IT. Cognos Planning 8.4 has a new Web-based rich client that improves the planning interface, and support for TM1 OLAP capability in Analyst, if TM1 is separately licensed.

•IBM (Cognos) has good partnerships with system integrators and resellers that enable the company to extend its global footprint. Being an IBM company will also increase penetration into existing IBM customers.

•The acquisition of Applix in 2007 provided an in-memory, OLAP engine, TM1, which strengthens general reporting and analytics capabilities, and provides good integration with Excel. This has been integrated with the Cognos BI platform and Planning Analyst but not Contributor, which is lagging behind in the market with an OLAP-based planning engine, continuing to deliver this application in two distinct components (Contributor and Analyst).


Cautions

•Despite continued product enhancements, the underlying technology of IBM (Cognos) Planning is starting to show its age, and will face increased challenges in the future, even with the releases of Cognos 8 v.3 in January and, most recently, Cognos 8 v.4. However, Cognos is planning to incorporate the acquired TM1 technology to augment its planning solution to address this in 2009.

•The IBM (Cognos) financial-consolidation solution, Controller, is an established product but does not have the same penetration in the direct sales, partner and system integrator communities as Cognos Planning. This means that Controller's market presence is limited in North America, when compared with other IBM (Cognos) products. This has not improved much since the 2007 Magic Quadrant.

•For profitability modeling and optimization, IBM (Cognos) has a partnership with Acorn Systems that has still not generated significant interest. However, according to IBM (Cognos), 25% of TM1's customers are performing profitability analysis. Consequently, the TM1 acquisition gives IBM (Cognos) the opportunity to plug this gap, but it still being sold as separate products and the integration of Planning with TM1 will not be completed until future releases.

•Disappointingly, the read/write capabilities of TM1 will not be leveraged as a replacement for the relational database Contributor until future releases, undisclosed at present. We see this as a major opportunity for IBM (Cognos), which has stated that when it migrates to TM1 for Cognos Planning Contributor, it will have three interfaces positioned in deals depending on customer requirements: the Excel interface, the existing TM1 read/write interface, and a rich-client interface. IBM (Cognos) asserted that migration should be relatively simple; however, as in all significant upgrades, Gartner believes that services from IBM (Cognos) or another system integrator will be necessary. Moreover, an OLAP-based planning solution for IBM (Cognos) Planning will be a welcome addition in the market, as Planning 8.4 still has walls between data entry and reporting, and requires a separate process to send plan data to Analyst for reporting.

more at:
Magic Quadrant 2008 for CPM Suites