Cognos Technology Acquisition Provides Foundation for Complete Data Mart Solution
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Cognos, a leading strategic supplier of enterprise business intelligence solutions, has announced the purchase of the assets of Relational Matters, and, notably, the DecisionStream software for US$10 million in a mixture of cash and stock.

In addition, Relational Matters' founders Peter Griffiths and David Griffin, and the UK-based Relational Matters' Research and Development team, will join Cognos. DecisionStream is a high-performance tool for aggregating and integrating large volumes of transaction data with multidimensional data structures. It significantly reduces deployment and management costs for data marts, optimising access to key performance indicators and co-ordinating dimension models used for reporting and analysis across the enterprise.

This transaction enhances Cognos' status as the business intelligence company best able to provide an end-to-end business intelligence solution. The DecisionStream technology extends Cognos' market-leading OLAP capabilities by simplifying the loading of data marts containing integrated Cognos PowerPlay, PowerCubes and Impromptu Catalogues, merging operational and flat file data sources, and co-ordinating views of data marts throughout an organisation. At a time when business intelligence solutions are being propelled into a wider market, including small to mid-sized companies, Cognos continues to provide the most Complete business intelligence solution. With this technology acquisition, Cognos is raising the industry bar in terms of the speed of results and the ease of enterprise deployment of business intelligence solutions.

"This technology further supports our ability to provide a complete business intelligence solution for our enterprise customers," said Alan Rottenberg, Cognos' senior vice president, Marketing and Business Strategy. "The success of enterprise business intelligence is becoming more and more dependent on having an integrated approach to loading and managing data marts. By leveraging the strength of the DecisionStream product in this area and building on the synergy between our solutions, Cognos provides the most complete solution for our customers."

"As the leading global provider of business intelligence tools, Cognos has the product knowledge, technical expertise and infrastructure to provide our customers with an unparalleled solution. We are very excited about the opportunities this transaction represents," said Peter Griffiths, CEO of Relational Matters. "Our philosophy has always been to embrace a total solution by backing products with consulting, training and technical support. With its award winning family of business intelligence products supported by an award winning world-wide infrastructure, we feel comfortable that Cognos shares our focus on delivering results."

Relational Matters

Relational Matters, "The OLAP Integration Company", develops high performance data, aggregation products used for populating data warehouses, data marts and OLAP servers. The DecisionStream product line is built around a multi-dimensional framework enabling the integration and distribution of data between data warehouses and data marts, and includes support for all major relational databases and OLAP server products. Founded in 1993, Relational Matters is a privately held company that has developed the first OLAP-aware data integration product and enables customers to dramatically reduce the initial implementation time as well as the ongoing maintenance and future deployment costs of decision support databases. Relational Matters has offices in the UK and North America and has regional support in the Asia Pacific region. For more information visit http://www.relmat.com.

Cognos

Cognos is the leading vendor of enterprise business intelligence solutions. Business Intelligence software makes corporate data easily accessible to everyone in an organisation, so they can better co-ordinate decision-making across the entire enterprise, and improve the performance of the business. Cognos products are available directly from Cognos and through an extensive network of channel partners. The Company also develops, markets and supports software tools for application development.

Founded in 1969, Cognos is a publicly traded company with offices around the world and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.