Applications:

Cognos Analytic Applications for SAP

Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence (BI), announced a comprehensive suite of Cognos enterprise analytic applications for SAP R/3 and mySAP. Delivering the industry's best breadth and depth, and fastest time to result, Cognos Analytic Applications provide an enterprise foundation of pre-packaged analytic applications including Sales Analysis, Accounts Receivable Analysis, General Ledger Analysis, Accounts Payable Analysis, Inventory Analysis and Procurement Analysis.

Specifically designed for the tens of thousands of SAP environments worldwide, Cognos Analytic Applications allow corporate decision makers to monitor, analyze and understand business information from both SAP and non-SAP data sources to ensure enterprise-wide organizational effectiveness. These applications can be deployed individually or cross functionally to allow an integrated process view of a key business driver -- customer, financial or supply chain performance. Each Cognos Analytic Application for SAP R/3 and mySAP is a powerful building block toward Corporate Performance Management (CPM), enabling a single, integrated, 360-degree view of business operations built upon a common enterprise foundation.

Cognos Analytic Applications answer more than 2,900 business questions with 500 plus known key performance indicators and 200 pre-packaged reports. With ability to quickly reflect unique ERP customizations built-in, Cognos Analytic Applications for SAP allow customers to quickly turn their SAP operational data into analytic information without needing to create complex ABAP scripts. Cognos Analytic Applications include flexible time trending, intuitive graphical interface, flexible self-service reporting and analytics, historical analysis, dimensionality and drill downs, cross-functional analytics and reporting, and pre-packaged reports reflecting customers' ERP customizations.

"Cognos is expanding its offering to deliver a suite of analytic applications for SAP R/3 and mySAP, joining offerings for J.D. Edwards World and OneWorld and Oracle eBusiness Suite customers. Organizations are placing a premium on solutions that help them analyze business performance in order to drive greater efficiencies and opportunity. Cognos Analytic Applications for SAP R/3 provide organizations with a means to analyze and easily report on rich ERP data," said Henry Morris, group vice president for Applications and Information Access, IDC.

Cognos Analytic Applications provide customers with the following critical advantages:

• Built-in Business Value -- The Cognos Analytic Applications combine Cognos market leading BI tools with best business practices resulting in a unique value for customers. The built-in business knowledge is based on years of analytic applications expertise and leverage Cognos' more than 15 years of business intelligence experience with one of the industry's largest customer bases among independent BI vendors. Cognos breadth and depth of BI ensures you have the right lens into information for the right role.
• Extensible for Competitive Advantage -- Cognos provides the tools used to build the applications to ease customizations or extensions to any piece of the applications -- whether it is adding additional SAP and non-SAP data, the open data warehouse model, new areas for analysis, customer-specific metrics, new/changed reports and analyses, or new BI pieces for new lenses into the content. The result accelerates return and reduces project risk.
• Production-Ready Architecture -- Cognos Analytic Applications are purpose-built for J.D. Edwards, Oracle and SAP on top of a single enterprise data model. This allows the solution to rapidly integrate into enterprise environments with a minimum of IT effort, ensuring they can start anywhere with confidence incremental applications will combine seamlessly into a whole. IT also benefits from easy customizations to reflect their unique ERP customizations, built-in best BI practices and best data warehousing practices, including the automation of incremental data updates and slowly changing dimensions.
• Accelerated Time to Result -- All the steps for building this kind of solution have been completed and put in the box. This drives value in and time out at every step: modeling the problem, preparing the data, analyze and deliver insights. The result is pre-packaged components for IT and business people ensuring a fast time to analytics with data integrity, quality, reliability and accuracy.

"This marks yet another in a series of milestones for Cognos Analytic Applications. With years of analytic applications expertise and demonstrated customer successes, Cognos continues to bring to market new breed of analytic applications that enable organizations to better monitor, analyze and understand their corporate performance," David Kleinhans, area vice president, Cognos Analytic Applications.

About Cognos Analytic Applications

Cognos Analytic Applications are pre-built, extensible software solutions to drive and enable better decision-making, improve performance, and reduce bottlenecks. They extend the value of ERP and other operational systems, transforming operational data into consistent, reliable information optimized for reporting and analysis. Their sole purpose is to analyze business data in order to react quickly to market and business trends.

With six analytic applications -- sales, accounts receivable, general ledger, accounts payable, inventory and procurement -- organizations can benefit from a single, integrated, 360-degree view of business operations built upon a common foundation for enterprise-wide corporate performance management.

About Cognos

Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence (BI), delivers software that helps companies improve business performance by enabling effective decision-making at all levels of the organization. A forerunner in defining the BI software category, Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage-Corporate Performance Management (CPM)-achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale.

CPM lets organizations measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels across the enterprise. Cognos provides a framework for CPM that links people, information, and decision-making processes throughout the organization, and enables the complete management cycle with integrated software for planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding.

Cognos serves more than 19,000 customers in over 120 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at www.cognos.com.