Cognos Now! Operational Business Intelligence

Overview

Cognos Now! is a family of operational business intelligence and performance management solutions available as appliances or hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. Operational business intelligence lets decision-makers proactively track, monitor, and respond to continuously up-to-date operational metrics in real-time or near real-time, with minimal IT intervention, and for a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

The industry's first BI appliance

• Continuous monitoring of your business operations: The Cognos Now! appliance streams operational data from disparate sources into a patent-pending 64-bit memory-based Streaming Data Store.
• Interactive self-service dashboards: Operational users can personalize and customize their dashboards to view metrics related to their day-to-day jobs. They can create new metrics and alerts, set thresholds, and assign tasks themselves, reducing the burden on IT.
• Absolute lowest TCO: Deploy a single, integrated operational BI product quickly, with minimal ongoing maintenance. Includes a license for unlimited users, data sources, and dashboards per appliance.

Purpose-built for scalability and performance

• Support for all sizes of operational business intelligence deployments.
• Product architecture consistently delivers information in a few seconds, regardless of query volume or number of users.
• Patent-pending streaming data flow engine caches data and analytical information in memory and streams it to large numbers of users, ensuring uniform query response times as more users are added.
• Graphically rich dashboard that users can easily customize or modify to suit changing business conditions.

A single, integrated product

• Operational dashboards: Continuous visibility into all of your critical business information and an easy-to-use interface for customizing metrics, setting alerts, and drilling down to detailed data.
• Application workbench: Allows system administrators to quickly and easily set up data integration, analytic models, and end-user dashboards to present current information, historical data, or aggregated views.
• Streaming server: Houses a patent-pending streaming data store for continuous data integration, as well as engines for multi-dimensional analysis, dynamic modeling, business-rules execution, and exception and alert reporting.

Operational Dashboards

Key benefits include:

• Drill-down analysis: Track performance and examine metrics in the finest detail for root-cause analysis.
• Self-service dashboards: Individual users can easily customize and modify at-a-glance views.
• Data-level security: Each user receives only the information required for their job.
• Exception management: Set up alerts and receive immediate notification when metrics reach critical thresholds.
• Integrated task management: Share exceptional situations with others on your team and track them to resolution.

Continuous visibility and closed-loop task management

• Continuous visibility: Event-driven architecture enables a continuous stream of business data, providing fresh views of key metrics for constant measuring and monitoring of business operations.
• Flexible user interface: Each user can personalize their dashboard to most effectively present the information they need; charts and graphs can be customized, thresholds and alerts can be set, and new dashboards can be created using a simple point-and-click interface.
• Role-based information delivery: Integrated data-level security ensures that each user receives only the information that is relevant and necessary for their job.
• Collaboration and workflow: Users can specify workflow processes that will automatically escalate an alert to different managers, superiors or subordinates based on the importance of the alert and the role of each user within the organization. Managers and executives can also easily assign tasks from within their dashboards and, with closed-loop task management, track the assignment to completion.