IBM Cognos Express

IBM took a step to a segment of the market of medium-sized enterprises, new to itself (staff — from hundred people, turnover — from 50 mln. dollars), having placed the special solution for the market of SMB — IBM Cognos Express in a line of the analytical products Cognos.

In fact is even more necessary for medium-sized enterprises of the business analyst, than for large: the share in the market is less, and the competition is higher. Before proposing this solution, IBM conducted a small research of the market. It became clear that representatives SMB were frightened off, first, by the high price of products, secondly, fear of destruction of business due to the need to distract employees on their implementation and thirdly — a shortcoming of IT specialists.

The new product of IBM for the market of SMB consists of four principal components which can be established and work as in a single batch, and separately. The module for the business analysis of Xcelerator (based on Excel) complements the Excel functions with the analytical mechanism working on in-memory technology (allows to make calculations in real time directly in RAM), and supports the multidimensional analysis of the reporting. The component for creation of requests and the reporting of Reporter has ample opportunities for creation of the reporting (operational, transactional). One more module — Advisor — allows to make in real time the analysis and visualization, in particular in the mode 'what will be if' (with a possibility of preserving of the scenario) to embed reports and diagrams in different applications of the popular MS Office office suite. At last, the fourth solution component — Planner — provides computer-aided planning, budgeting and forecasting based on TM1 technology, has the mechanism of the automated approval of budgets. In respect of a preliminary estimate of functionality of the Express system it is necessary to carry an opportunity to download trial version for free use within 30 days to the pleasant moments. For the market of SMB (however, conditional and, if I may say so, quite reasonable) should carry to shortcomings of a product of IBM, probably, that this solution has restriction on the number of users — to hundred.