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Cognos scales mountains (of data)

by Jackie Zack

Steve Newman, Cognos' strategic partner manager for Teradata

Business managers in every industry face similar challenges, and one of their biggest headaches is business report writing. Is there a way to efficiently use data and increase the effectiveness of the reporting environment? Can it be done quickly and easily? Thanks to Cognos ReportNet, the answer is a resounding "Yes!"

A Teradata business intelligence partner, Cognos helps companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance. The company's integrated software supports data access, analysis, reporting, visualization, scorecarding, planning and event-detection for a completely integrated view of a business using the Teradata Warehouse. In September 2003, the company launched Cognos ReportNet, the first completely Web-based enterprise reporting solution to address several key areas. Version 1.1 arrived on the market in February 2004.

"We had many different design goals while developing Cognos ReportNet," says Steve Newman, Cognos' strategic partner manager for Teradata. "One was to leverage and optimize Cognos ReportNet for our customers' existing systems, including security systems, applications servers, portals and database platforms. Another development goal was to change the reporting paradigm to handle all of the different types of reporting from a single solution. Most customers have reporting needs, which include production reporting (such as paycheck and invoice processing), ad hoc reporting, managed or ‘distributed' reporting and system integrated/embedded reporting."

Cognos ReportNet allows businesses to standardize all enterprise reporting with a single product and a single architecture. "That's the unique functionality that Cognos ReportNet has—and one that none of our competitors can claim today," Newman says. One noteworthy feature is ReportNet's ability to process data directly within the Teradata database engine in real time, without creating sep-arate online analytical processing cubes.

Another feature is scalability and manageability. "We cross the entire vertical market space of Teradata's worldwide customer base. ReportNet allows customers to analyze the vast amounts of data that they are storing in Teradata," Newman says. "When customers use Cognos, they're able to not just run a couple of queries, but they're able to push out that reporting and analysis to hundreds of thousands of users."

When a U.S.-based entertainment company needed to analyze data from its Teradata Warehouse about the more than 19 million customers enrolled in its loyalty program, it used Cognos. As a result, when some of its customers returned home from a visit to one of its properties, a personalized thank-you letter with coupons was already in their mailboxes. The company was able to develop a more targeted marketing campaign, resulting in a 14% increase in year-over-year revenue and an additional $50 million in bottom-line results.

The ability to deliver high-quality reports to a massive number of users—internal or external—is something every business needs.

"You already have one of the most scalable data warehouses in the world with Teradata, and now you can have the most scalable business intelligence front end to report on that data," Newman says. "Marry the two together and you have one of the most scalable data reporting/analysis environments available on the market today."

Jackie Zack, a Michigan-based business, technical and feature writer, has written for several trade journals.