"The market needs an independent BI vendor"
Mar 6, 2007

On his first visit to India, Jack Thomas, President, Asia Pacific, Cognos talks to Praveen Kurup about some of their critical business plans and tries to explain why independent BI player like Cognos are essential for strategic deployments.

What do you have to say about generic software vendors strengthening their BI capabilities, or in some cases, coming out with separate BI offerings?
It is not just about the technology, it is years of experience in working with customers on a specific challenge. We have been doing performance management and BI for over 15 years now. This experience and knowledge of working with the customer has gone into the product. Producing technology is not that difficult now, a number of vendors do that now. But how will they bring the same depth and ease of use that we have evolved over the years. That is a choice that customers have to make. Of course, such vendors will offer their technology at a very low cost. And that will be a tempting offer, but we expect that the serious customers will come in and look at vendors like us.

I think that the market needs to have an independent BI vendor who provides an independent solution. Because the world is heterogeneous. Most customers have a mix of applications and they are looking for an independent vendor to tie together all that resides in SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

But isn't there significant interoperability in these BI tools too?
I think it is a question of who does it best. For any player to sell they will obviously have to claim heterogeneity. But the question is who can do it best. We are just betting on our deep domain knowledge.

What constitutes 'serious' customers for you?
You can look at BI either as a tactical deployment, which means, if I have an application, I'll get reports out of this application. Serious customers are the ones who are looking at BI as a strategic deployment. This means enterprises who have a lot information, a lot of users, and want to ensure that all this information is received by every single user across the enterprise or beyond. When they are looking at that strategic level, they have to seriously look at all the existing data sources, as also the ones that would potentially come in the future, and evaluate how well can the solution deliver these in a variety of formats such as dashboards, static reports and dynamic reports, in a manner that every user -- both external and internal -- can consume.

This presents a challenge for somebody who is not a deep functionality vendor.

What kind of challenges?
First, you should be powerful enough to deliver the functionality for power users. at the same time you should be easy enough for a complete novice user. An example of a novice user is a banking consumer. If the bank wishes him to get on the portal, authenticate himself, get all the required reports, and be able to ask a few questions about his account. You can't do any training to this consumer. It should be completely intuitive. Then comes scalability across large number of users.

Around 2005, Cognos was pulled up by analysts for delay in launching Cognos 8. Why the delay?
Cognos 8 is a completely new architecture. An entirely rewritten bus that is really the first SOA-based performance management platform. It is a very significant technology release. The first iteration of this release was ReportNet, which is just an unbelievably successful launch of the reporting functionality of the new Cognos architecture. We launched that in 2003. It was a huge undertaking. Our goal was not to rush the product to market and to ensure that the quality was there in the product.

And, in reality, we did not delay the launch, it came on schedule. But we did something different from our normal practice. We did an early soft launch of the technology much before the product was available so that the market would know about it and plan for it. This was required because we had few million users who are using our early generation technology, and some of them would be appropriate to take advantage of the new architecture that was coming, and hence needed to be familiarized with the technology.

So Cognos 8 has integrated all your existing solutions. Any other components that were integrated?
There is a fundamental difference when you use a term like integration. It gives the impression that we have taken these pieces of software and joined them. That is not what we did. We rewrote all these into a single product that combines the functionality of all our earlier products. Earlier also these components were integrated at various levels; they were integrated at the metadata layer, the data level and the security layer. We moved beyond integration into unifying them into one product.

So Cognos did not have any SOA-enabled version before that?
We brought out the technology intot the reporting and querying capabilities as ReportNet in 2003. Then we enabled the other capabilities across components in the next two years. So it was SOA-enabled since the days of ReportNet.

What does the Celequest aquisition bring to Cognos?
This gives us BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) technology that are critical to monitoring manufacturing and production lines, etc. Their scorecarding technology is complementary to our capabilities. Their product is an appliance that shares a similar architecture, an SOA-enabled architecture. It is targeted at the mid-market. so it gives us the market opportunities that weren't earlier available to us. The product was developed by a guy who was one of the co-founders of Informatica.

Any integration happening on that front, or are you going to just sell their existing product line?
Yes, we are going to continue to sell these products separately because there is a market for the product as it is. But we are certainly going to integrate it into the Cognos 8 platform. And this would be a very straightforward process because the architecture of the products are compatible. It will take time, and in the mean time we intend to address the opportunity that the appliance offers.