| Cognos Inc. is expected to
announce this week a new corporate performance management solution
that incorporates technology the company acquired when it bought
Adaytum Inc. in December.
Cognos, based in Ottawa, Ontario, is combining Adaytum's
planning, budgeting and forecasting applications with its own
applications for financial analytics, scorecarding and enterprise
reporting. The enterprise planning solution will be a part of Cognos
Series 7, Release 1, according to Cognos officials.
"The integration will bring Cognos more into the CFO's office,"
said Mark Stimpson, director of product management for Management
Series Planning.
Stimpson said that while Cognos did not previously have the
planning capabilities to handle complex business logic, the
integration will also take Adaytum's software far beyond its
planning and forecasting strengths.
"Corporate performance management is not just planning and
forecasting, but monitoring the business and understanding the
business and keeping track of how actual performance compares to the
plan," said Stimpson.
Cognos Series 7 will provide analysis and reporting integrated
with the Adaytum applications. Users will be able to drill down into
PowerPlay OLAP cubes from the Adaytum planning and forecasting
environment to investigate underlying data. Cognos' Impromptu
catalog will also provide the semantic layer for reporting from the
planning and forecasting applications.
Cognos Metrics Manager will combine scorecarding with Adaytum's
planning and forecasting capabilities to allow decision makers to
adjust their plans based on early returns.
Cognos is also combining the consolidation and financial
reporting capabilities of its Cognos Finance application with
Adaytum's planning capability, helping CFOs to judge performance vs.
plan.
And Cognos is offering single sign-on across all of the
applications and providing access to the Adaytum applications from
the Cognos Series 7 portal environment.
This integration is expected to be completed by the end of the
month.
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