“Corporate Performance Management is a new concept”

Cognos, which offers business intelligence and corporate performance management solutions, delivers software that helps companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance across the enterprise. Forrest Palmer, the company’s managing director for Asia, shares his views with GAURAV PATRA

What brings you to India?

Cognos, which is known for its corporate performance solutions, is now bringing the concept of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) to India. Worldwide, it’s a new concept, but it’s catching up fast. India being a vast IT community and market, it is very essential for us to have a serious business presence here.

What exactly do you mean by CPM?

CPM is a new and interesting concept. As business leaders pursue best-in-class performance, they look at enterprise software solutions to help them establish repeatable and predictable processes for managing performance at all levels in their organisations. To accomplish this, they need a solution that gives ready access to reliable and consistent information. The solution should also let people know how their part of the business is being measured against set parameters, and provide the means to make adjustments and feed lessons learned into the strategic planning process.

Actually, all high-performance organisations have a CPM approach—they articulate the strategy into plan, monitor the performance of the plan, and thus discover what is working and what is not. What Cognos does is address all these requirements through a complete system of solutions—enterprise planning that is integrated with metrics management as well as business intelligence reporting and analytical capabilities to enable the entire management cycle. Breadth and depth, flexibility, data neutrality, scalability and enterprise view are the key differentiators of the Cognos CPM solution.

What else does Cognos offer?

Our company offers a wide range of solutions and services. Under our business intelligence offering, we have Business Intelligence Series 7, which is the most comprehensive enterprise-class business intelligence solution. It is an integrated software that delivers all of the BI capabilities an organisation requires to turn its data into meaningful information—reporting and analysis, event detection, as well as data preparation and ETL.

We also deliver Enterprise score carding through the Cognos Metrics Manager, which enables companies to model plans or strategies as a set of inter-connected performance indicators.

Another offering is Enterprise Planning. We enable enterprise performance planning through a broad range of integrated capabilities—modelling and target setting, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations and financial reporting. Our enterprise planning solution integrates plans and budgets across departments, divisions and locations, and translates corporate objectives into concrete financial and tactical plans.

What advantage does Cognos offer over competitors?

There are many. First of all, CPM offers an opportunity to get aligned to the new organisation. It is about the agility to react to the business issues of the organisation. As far as our offerings are concerned, we have the broadest range of solutions for CPM. CPM includes a number of key aspects of business. One of them is the planning aspect, where we score over others. The other areas where we bring in value for enterprises are business intelligence and data warehousing.

How do you think Cognos will do in the Indian market?

India has a growing interest in business intelligence. We will put in a lot of effort to grow the customer base here. Towards this end, we have increased our partnerships in India. Two years ago we started with one, but now we have four partners.

Currently we do not have any direct presence in India, but are operating through our partners, which is as good as a strong presence. As part of the Phase Two plan for India we are actively considering our next step, which would include having a direct presence here. This speaks about our seriousness.

Which segments here will adopt Cognos’ solutions?

The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector is critical for us. Apart from this, manufacturing, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals are the other segments we are targeting right now.