 |
|
|
|
Cognos Inc. - Business Intelligence Solutions - Category Directory (613) 738-1440 3755 Riverside Drive, P.O. Box 9707, Station T Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1G 4K9
Sales $622 million
Business Description Cognos Incorporated, a Canadian corporation founded in 1969, is a global leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) software solutions. Our solutions help improve business performance by enabling planned performance management, supported by effective decision-making at all levels of the organization through the consistent reporting and analysis of data derived from various sources. Using our software, customers can plan and manage the performance of all aspects of their business and gain valuable insights that can be used to improve operational effectiveness, enhance customer satisfaction, accelerate corporate response times and, ultimately, increase revenues and profits. Our integrated solutions consist of our suite of business intelligence components, analytical applications, and performance management applications. In fiscal 2004, we continued to invest in our business intelligence solutions which are the foundation of our CPM vision. In May 2003, we shipped Cognos ReportNet™, our new enterprise reporting software that provides coverage for both production and business reporting. In July 2003, we announced Cognos Metrics Manager 2.0, our next-generation scorecarding software for metrics management and interactive scorecarding and, in February 2004, we shipped Cognos Metrics Manager 2.1. Also in February 2004, we announced Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2, our solution for planning and budgeting. Our customers can strategically apply our software solutions across their extended enterprise to address their need for CPM. By allowing timely analysis of data from disparate systems, CPM enables organizations to measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels. Our solution for CPM allows users to effectively manage the full business cycle with planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding products. Our integrated solutions provide a scalable and secure web-based environment that is easy to use and deploy across the extended enterprise, which includes the organization, its customers, suppliers, and partners. The component-based nature of our software allows customers to purchase functionality that fits their particular needs and allows them to easily expand their capabilities as required. We focus on developing direct relationships with Global 3500 companies and large public sector organizations. Our direct sales force generated approximately 73% of our software license revenue for our fiscal year ended February 29, 2004. At yearend, we had 51 sales offices in 17 countries. In addition, we offer our customers a broad range of support and consulting services aimed at providing the highest level of customer satisfaction. We have an extensive and expanding global customer base with over 22,000 customers located in more than 135 countries. In fiscal 2004, we had total revenue of $683.1 million, of which approximately 58% was derived from sales in The Americas, 33% from sales in our Europe Region, and 9% from sales in our Asia/Pacific Region. For financial information about geographic areas, see “Note 14. Segmented Information” in the Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements contained in Item 8. PRODUCTS Our integrated solutions consist of our suite of business intelligence (business intelligence) components, analytical applications, and performance management applications. These components are supported by software services for administration, deployment, integration, and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL). Business Intelligence Components Our business intelligence solution is comprised of highly-scalable component-based software that facilitates all business intelligence activities, including reporting, query, analysis, visualization, and event management across the extended enterprise. Our business intelligence components are based on proprietary applications which offer the following functions: Query & Reporting. Cognos ReportNet is the newest component of our business intelligence solution. Built on a new state of the art architecture, Cognos ReportNet is our next-generation web-based query and reporting product that has been developed to specifically satisfy all enterprise reporting requirements. It delivers production reports such as invoices and statements as well as ad hoc query, managed reports, and a broad range of business reports. This new architecture is designed to provide high scalability and openness integrating with and leveraging customer’s existing infrastructure. It is based on industry standards such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL and is the foundation for future solution component releases. Our pre-existing reporting component is Impromptu® Web Reports. Customers can author, manage, and broadcast sales results, inventory figures, financial updates, and other regularly scheduled reports that are distributed to a large web-based community of users. Reports can be rendered and viewed by users in a variety of outputs, such as CSV, Excel, or Adobe PDF files. Our pre-existing query component, Cognos Query, presents users with a simple view of various databases, allowing them to quickly and easily navigate corporate data. This engine allows users to run predefined queries or build ad hoc queries. The software uses hyperlinks to allow users to jump from query to query to see related information, such as customer details, sales orders, or detailed records. Customers can continue to purchase Impromptu Web Reports and Cognos Query. We continue to update Impromptu Web Reports and Cognos Query, to reflect the changing requirements of our large customer base. For customers wanting to migrate their existing Impromptu Web Reports and Cognos Query reporting applications to Cognos ReportNet, we offer service packages and migration tools. From a licensing perspective, we have developed a migration program that enables supported customers to trade like-for-like functionality. Analysis. Our analysis component is Cognos PowerPlay®, which delivers on-line analytical process (OLAP) reporting and analysis. Users can perform their own ad hoc analysis by investigating, in any combination and at any level, the critical success factors that drive their business. PowerPlay’s single application component architecture allows organizations to deploy and manage on-line analytical processes from a central point of control. Through the web, Windows, or Excel, users are able to access multidimensional data and use PowerPlay for analysis and reporting. Users can manipulate information by “drilling down” through layers of summary information in successively greater levels of detail and can present the information in multiple graphical displays. Cognos PowerPlay 7.2, which was released at the end of fiscal 2003, is fully integrated with Cognos ReportNet and uses the same user interface standards for a seamless user experience across our business intelligence components. Visualization. With Cognos Visualizer, our visualization component, users can see complex business relationships and the interplay between factors that drive a company’s business. This web-based component delivers advanced visualization graphics, Six Sigma charts, animation, and mapping for stand-alone use and for embedding in Cognos business intelligence applications such as Cognos ReportNet dashboards. Event Management. Our event management component is Cognos NoticeCast®. Cognos NoticeCast can monitor changes to time critical content and then send an email notification to users. Users can define alert criteria themselves to monitor events such as changes in key performance indicators and operational data, and updates to reports. Along with the notification, users receive business intelligence content that gives context to decision making. Analytical Applications A trend in the market for business intelligence is the demand for pre-packaged solutions that shorten time to implementation and results. We have developed our analytical applications as an integrated set of applications to make it easy for customers to combine appropriate capabilities and to deploy them quickly. Our analytical applications are flexible and extendible because they are built upon the foundation of our business intelligence components. Customers are able to change models, create new reports, and perform new analyses by using our business intelligence components in conjunction with our analytical applications. These applications reduce the time, effort, and cost required for an organization to gain a competitive advantage from business intelligence and can help it realize returns on investment from operational applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management implementations more quickly. With our analytical applications, users gain access to their organization’s key information through more than 50 areas of analysis, answers to more than 2,900 critical business questions, over 650 key performance indicators, and over 400 reports in seven areas of the business: accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, inventory, procurement, production, and sales. These coordinated, departmental-specific analytical applications allow users to build an enterprise-wide view of their organization incrementally and strategically. Our analytical applications are based upon our CPM foundation, which is a data source independent data warehouse model, designed through years of applying our best-practices approach. Our solution is designed to extend the value of a customer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, transforming operational data into consistent, reliable information optimized for reporting and analysis. During fiscal 2004, we continued to invest in research and development activities for our analytical applications, including the release in December 2003 of Version 1.6 of our analytic applications. This release added support for metrics and integration with Cognos Metrics Manager, Cognos ReportNet, and Cognos Series 7 Version 2. Performance Management Applications In our solution for CPM, we offer products that address the need for organizations to link reporting and analysis to organizational goals and strategy. These applications span company functions and processes and define the parameters for performance in scorecards, plans, and budgets. Scorecarding. In July 2003, we announced Cognos Metrics Manager 2.0 which brought new functionality to our next generation scorecarding and metrics management software. In February 2004, we shipped a follow up version Cognos Metrics Manager 2.1. With Cognos Metric Manager, users can view and interact with scorecards that contain key performance metrics and can analyze each metric individually in order to understand the drivers of performance. By linking the company’s strategy and goals to execution through metrics, users get a clear picture of the performance of the whole business. In addition, metrics are linked to the business intelligence layer for further reporting and analysis. Planning and Budgeting. In February 2004, we launched Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 with additional customer-driven functionality, technical enhancements, and further interoperability with our enterprise business intelligence solution and scorecarding. The Cognos Enterprise Planning Series combines Cognos Enterprise Planning and Cognos Finance into one financial suite that delivers budgeting, planning, forecasting, accounting consolidation, and financial reporting. The solution delivers capabilities that help customers drive, monitor, and report on financial performance: • flexible modeling for a variety of financial and non-financial planning based on business measures, ratios, and sophisticated calculations under the control of financial planners; • collaboration with workflow to extend the planning process across the organization, with business managers controlling their own business plans in the context of an overall corporate plan; and • high participation and ease of use so that users can enter, analyze, and adjust plan data and model parameters in any way, including top-down analysis or using break-back calculations, which fill in values to arrive at a set total. The solution enables business and financial managers to collaborate to define the scope of their plan, including restructuring and re-organizing, using zero-based budgeting or providing a starting point based on the previous year’s trends, as well as providing up-to-date results. Managers can collaborate and delegate planning details to lower-level managers to receive a complete and detailed financial view, making the process of gathering information and distributing it to relevant stakeholders easy to administer. In addition, the solution integrates up-to-date data when available from other systems with user-supplied forecasts and the overall enterprise plan. Through its consolidation engine, the solution supports global enterprises by providing a unified view of performance, in multiple currencies, and performs the necessary roll-up, eliminations, allocations, and adjustments required as a part of the consolidation and external financial reporting process. Management and Integration Software Services Across our business intelligence components, analytic applications, and performance management applications, we provide software services for administration, deployment, integration, and ETL to deliver highly integrated and expandable solutions. Customers who purchase one of our solution components are also provided with the software services for administering and deploying as integrated parts of the solution. With these software services, our customers can more quickly and easily deploy the server-based capabilities to users. In addition, this approach facilitates a customer’s ability to add new capabilities because additional components can be easily plugged into the existing software services. This flexibility is critical as customers’ requirements change and as we introduce new capabilities to our solutions. Our software services consists of the following: • administration services; • deployment services; • integration services; and • data ETL services. - These services operate in an integrated environment. The scalability of the architecture allows organizations to deliver business intelligence applications to a large and broad user community across the extended enterprise. Administration Services. Our administration services allow IT managers to manage and maintain installation and configuration of our servers. In addition, we provide data modeling that drives consistency and adaptability of our solution. Our modeling is designed to present information stored in corporate databases in a consistent format. This ensures that every manager has a common foundation for evaluating business performance and making key business decisions. Each manager can be provided with a personalized view of information, as well as a common view of business performance that permits the rapid coordination of management decisions and actions. In addition, common business rules, calculations, and goals, such as the definitions of profitability, cash flow, and return on investment, are visible and shared by all users, which ensures that every manager has a consistent view of the business. Deployment Services. Our deployment services provide security and content delivery and management for users across the extended enterprise. With our security, IT managers can address both authentication, which confirms the user’s identity, and authorization, which determines what information users have the right to view. And with open security standards, Cognos security can be easily integrated with other enterprise security systems. Our own portal services for content delivery and management can be customized to fit seamlessly in an existing company portal or intranet/extranet environment and is designed to ensure that each user views only the content they have authority to access. It can be customized to present application content in a format that is familiar and appropriate to each user and also allows for sharing of information and collaboration among many users. Integration Services. Our integration services provide the ability to integrate with and leverage customers’ existing applications and infrastructure. Based on web-services, leveraging industry standards including XML, SOAP, and WSDL, we provide an open environment for external enterprise application integration, customization, and automation of many aspects of our solution. Standards-driven, fully-documented application program interfaces allow customers to customize their applications to best serve their users’ needs. ETL Services. Our ETL service, Cognos DecisionStream™, is optimized for modeling, transforming, and creating high-speed, scalable analytical data warehouses that have embedded knowledge of the business intelligence applications they will serve, thereby enabling faster deployment and user acceptance of these applications. Our ETL services and business intelligence components work together to ensure that many of the calculations and analytic operations can be performed at the database level, which can dramatically improve response time and network traffic loads. Companies can build analytical data warehouses that span the extended enterprise, ensuring consistency and rapid adoption of changes. This service forms the basis for our analytic applications and is the critical component for information consistency for CPM. Application Development Tools We have a legacy line of products based on application development products marketed under the PowerHouse®, PowerHouse Web, and Axiant® names, which represented approximately 4.3% of our total revenue for the fiscal year ended February 29, 2004. PowerHouse is an application development environment that enables customers to quickly develop complex business applications. We believe there has been a fundamental shift over the past several years away from application development environments towards packaged solutions. The large majority of organizations now choose to buy their next generation of business systems, rather than attempt to build these corporate applications internally. Our strategy for this mature part of our business is focused on maintaining the product and supporting our existing customers. Product support is the largest source of revenue from these customers, and as a result, we expect to continue to update our application development products to reflect the changing requirements of our customers. We expect our revenue from application development tools to continue to decline as customers focus on the next generation of our CPM solution. GLOBAL CUSTOMER SERVICES Support, consulting, and training services are a critical part of our business intelligence, analytic applications, and performance management solutions. We offer a wide variety of packaged and on-demand services to assist our customers with the installation, deployment, and effective use of our solutions. As customers increase the deployment of our products throughout the extended enterprise, we believe that our customers will increasingly demand additional services. Growth in our services revenue is highly correlated with increases in our license revenue, and our ability to deliver services in a timely and effective manner is a large and expanding part of our complete solution. We offer our customers a broad range of support, consulting, and training services aimed at providing the highest level of customer satisfaction. These services include: Support Services Support services consist primarily of implementation resolution, product configurations, documentation, and support for product problem resolution. Telephone support and web-based customer self-service support are key to customer satisfaction and are available worldwide. Our web-based support service provides our customers with online answers to their product questions, 24 hours a day. Consulting Services We offer a variety of consulting services to assist our customers with project management and planning, architecture design, training needs assessment, and successful deployment. These service offerings are billed on a daily basis at competitive rates or are provided as packaged services for a particular project or task over a specific time frame. Our consulting services are aimed at guiding our customers from early stages of a Cognos project through the solution implementation process. In addition, we have specific consulting services offerings for our largest enterprise customers with customized senior engagement management. Engagement managers work onsite with large customers to ensure that optimal application and deployment strategies are put in place and that customers can make maximum use of our existing and emerging products and services, with the aim of delivering the highest degree of success and return on investment. Training Services Customers typically require specific training when they purchase our solution. In addition, we believe that customer training helps maximize the potential productivity gains from our products. We provide classroom training at Cognos training centers and on-site at customer locations. We also offer a suite of e-learning courses available for download from our Global Customer Support web portal, or for delivery to customers on CD. We offer courses on individual product components as well as courses on a solution approach. All of our training products can be customized to incorporate a customer’s corporate data to enhance and accelerate their learning experience. CUSTOMERS Over 22,000 customers located in more than 135 countries have deployed our business intelligence, analytic application, and performance management solutions. Our primary target market is Global 3500 companies and large public sector organizations. We also license our products to a broad base of small and medium-size organizations. Although our software solution is a complete solution for the extended enterprise, our customers typically purchase in stages. The first stage usually involves the purchase of a component of our solution to address a particular departmental requirement. The second stage usually involves purchases by other departments within that organization, often for applications that are closely related to the initial purchase, or purchases of additional components by the same department, or the addition of more users of the initial implementation. In many cases, there are a number of purchases in several departments of an organization before a customer makes the decision to standardize and deploy our solution on an enterprise-wide basis. Sometimes these tactical purchases involve product from other vendors. Companies are realizing a total cost of ownership opportunity by standardizing on a single vendor. Throughout the sales cycle, we work closely with our customers in the design of new products and the evolution of existing solutions. We view our large customer base as a significant asset. Because our services make it easy for customers to add new capabilities to the established infrastructure, our current customer base represents a significant market for additional business intelligence, analytical application, and performance management sales. Typically, customers deploy our solution to a limited number of potential users in the first stage, providing significant revenue opportunities for additional sales. Our solution can be deployed across all industries. Data-intensive businesses, such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government, as well as industries that are under competitive pressure to continually improve their business processes, such as retail, automotive, consumer packaged goods, and other manufacturing companies, have been the leaders in adopting enterprise-wide solutions. We have a broad customer base with no single customer accounting for 10% or more of our total revenue in any of the last three fiscal years. COMPETITION Ticker COGN
Business Intelligence Companies in the Directory |
|
© companyseek.com | About | Category Index | Add URL
Companies: A-B C-D E-G H-L M-O P-R S-T U-Z Major Firms Niche Firms
Major Categories: Computers Office Equip Comm Equip Software Finance B2B Services Telecom IT Law Marketing Education
Transportation Industrial Services HR Security Construction Insure Retail Industrial Equipment
Portions of the companyseek.com Business Directory based on modifications of the Open Directory Project and SEC filings.
|