COGNOS GOES VIRTUAL WITH WAREHOUSE PROJECT

Cognos will introduce a data mart solution, DecisionStream 6.0, that company officials said will provide the necessary business intelligence alternative for companies that cannot afford the time or money needed for a million-dollar data warehouse project.

According to Tom Camps, vice president of market strategies at Cognos, the answer for those customers is a new architectural approach that will allow them to build data marts, which are less cumbersome than full-blown data warehouses. With DecisionStream, those data marts can be specified to meet the needs of each department within a company, yet predicated on a consistent set of data -- an important advantage in an enterprise environment.

"When you scale to the enterprise and try to give everyone decision-support capabilities, you had better make sure your data is consistent," Camps said. "If not, you can give users the same tool and the same look at what you think is the same data, but you may not come with the same numbers in the end, and therefore will make different decisions."

To eliminate that concern, DecisionStream offers a shared dimensional framework for building a series of coordinated, business intelligence data marts that can be linked to provide a solution similar to a virtual data warehouse. This means that companies can leverage their existing relational data sources while offering enhanced analytic capabilities.

"The advantage of this architecture is that data marts are relational in nature, which means they can live inside the relational database that most organizations already have on hand," said Phil Russom, an analyst at Hurwitz Group, in Framingham, Mass. "There's also a lot of risk involved with integrating data warehouse solutions, so this allows customers to avoid the cost and time associated with that."

Another advantage with DecisionStream, added Russom, is its integration with Cognos' business intelligence tools to provide a complete, end-to-end data mart solution. Russom said this end-to-end capability is what sets Cognos apart and will prove valuable to companies that do not have the internal expertise or the money to pay consultants to integrate a solution.

"There's a lot of value out of the box with an end-to-end solution such as this," said Russom. "There are competitors out there, such as Sagent, that can offer data marts, but Cognos now is the only one able to offer the end-to-end solution, from data mart to client-side tools, and to integrate it for you."

According to Cognos' Camps, that is exactly what customers are asking for.

"People want to do business intelligence, but they want to do business intelligence without thinking," Camps said. "They are less interested in implementing new technologies and more interested in gaining value."

Cognos DecisionStream 6.0 is currently in a beta phase and will be generally available in August, with pricing yet to be determined. Cognos Inc., in Ottawa, is at http://www.cognos.com.