“Almost all top global banks use Cognos”

With Indian firms going global, the need for Business Intelligence is slowly gaining momentum in the country. Cognos, one of the leading players in the space, is hoping to make inroads in this market. Forrest Palmer, managing director, Cognos Asia, spoke to VENKATESH GANESH on changing trends

* BI is still in a nascent stage in India. Do you think the time is now ripe for the technology to take off?

We feel the market for BI in India is ripe. There are a lot of things happening in the telecom and government sectors. With the global nature of Indian companies and the maturity of the offshore model, the industry is demanding BI solutions. The diverse nature of an organisation requires it to collate and implement data in a uniform manner. Secondly, companies have begun standardising on BI as a strategic tool. India is a strategic market and we see it as a huge growth driver in the future. To support this, we are setting up a development centre by the end of this year. Though IDC estimates that the Indian market for BI is not that big, we believe this is not the case. We see growth for BI coming from verticals such as telecom, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and BFSI. Globally, almost all the top banks use Cognos solutions, and we are confident that this trend will be seen in India too.

* You recently launched Enterprise Planning Series 7.2. What’s new?

Planning and Business Intelligence has been put to the test with Enterprise Planning Series 7.2. It has attribute-based models to facilitate complex dimensional consolidation and reporting. The product also has better integration with Excel, wherein charts and graphs can be linked to planning data. On the planning front, in addition to the real-time visibility of the operating performance that we provide, Cognos Enterprise Planning 7.2 provides tighter integration of planning data with production reporting as well as support for direct entry commands (which can be used for active planning). The software combines the former Cognos Finance product with planning and budgeting software acquired last year from Adaytum. It supports financial reporting, calculation of business drivers’ effects on budget plans, and metrics based on time horizons. It also features a single sign-on user authentication and can be integrated with other Cognos products such as Metrics Manager, Impromptu and PowerPlay. The PowerPlay product is very popular in the Indian market. Additionally, Indian enterprises have taken to scorecarding tools that help in coordinating mid and lower-level management. Our ultimate objective is making reports easy to understand without much training.

* You have upgraded ReportNet [Cognos’ reporting tool]. What are the changes?

We launched ReportNet in September last year and it has been well-received by the market. The work on ReportNet started four years back with a completely new architecture. ReportNet 1.1 features better integration with third-party products; this includes support for SAP’s business warehouse and several of IBM’s WebSphere and DB2 management products. We have clients who use ReportNet’s capabilities to generate reports from multiple sources of data. These include SAP’s business warehouse and Microsoft’s SQL Server. The way it works is that it allows the company to get the required information by asking a single question rather than querying separate data sources. Prior to this, the company had to dump the data into Excel or run separate reports from each data source. Further, it can be tightly integrated with the rest of the Cognos product portfolio. This level of integration was not available earlier. We are seeking to provide a one-stop shop for enterprises looking for everything from data extraction, transformation and loading to query, reporting and analysis. The product has grossed close to $50 million worldwide till date.

We see ReportNet as part of the overall Corporate Performance Management framework. However, most organisations in India have not gone beyond spreadsheets for their budgeting and planning. Even our understanding points to something similar. The spreadsheet is used as a tool for budgeting and planning. In fact, users of Cognos’ Enterprise Planning product still work with spreadsheets on the side, so we are planning to incorporate more spreadsheet-like features and functionality into future versions of it. The use of a dedicated budgeting and planning tool does have its advantages beyond managed spreadsheets, particularly with respect to rapidly accelerating the budgeting and planning process, and thereby tying everything back into BI.

* Cognos acquired Adaytum last year. How does it fit in?

If you see our past we have a blend of acquisitions and in-house development. Sometimes we feel that it is better to build than acquire, since there are a whole host of issues such as integrating the existing architecture with the new one, and this takes a lot of resolving. In the case of Adaytum it was perfect synergy. Adaytum’s planning, budgeting and forecasting applications with Cognos’ financial analytics, scorecarding and enterprise reporting fitted smoothly into our scheme of things. While Cognos previously did not have the planning capabilities to handle complex logic, the integration has taken Adaytum’s software beyond its planning and forecasting into monitoring, understanding and keeping track of how business performance compares to business plans. Today a notable part of our growth comes because of Adaytum. The planning capability was a very strategic addition. Currently we don’t have any plans, but we’ve been very successful in generating cash and we’d like to put that to work. So we’re very open to acquisitions.