Cognos unveils new performance management system

At its Cognos Forum gathering this week in Orlando, business software maker Cognos will talk about the steps it is taking to help customers better use its reporting and analysis applications -- a change that will focus on improving the processes around those applications, rather than the technology itself.

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Cognos bundles together its full range of software under the "corporate performance management" banner, an umbrella area it defines as covering the processes and software applications organizations use to track organizational performance metrics like financial goals and results.

At the conference Cognos is unveiling the new Cognos Performance Management System, linking together all of its software along with its services offerings and best-practices studies. As Cognos Vice President of Market Strategy Mychelle Mollot describes it, the system is Cognos' effort to better serve customers trying to optimize their software use. "Up until about a year ago, most customers were using the various components of our system as point solutions," she said. "Once they started [using a more complete set], we started identifying gaps in what we were bringing to them."

Most of those gaps were in the best practices area, Mollot said. To address that, Cognos put together "Plan-to-Perform" blueprints, design specifications that describe technology and business processes for implementing Cognos' software to track corporate functions like financial, sales and capital expenditure planning. It will introduce several new ones this week.

Cognos is also introducing a new licensing option, which will also carry the Cognos Performance Management System name, allowing customers to purchase all of its applications. Available for enterprise customers licensing for a minimum of 1,000 users, the system encompasses scorecarding, dashboarding, analysis, query and reporting and event management tools to help organizations plan and measure various aspects of their corporate performance.

To support the system, Cognos is introducing a new partner initiative, dubbed "Powered by Cognos." The program encourages partners to build specialized performance-management systems incorporating Cognos technology to address specific industries, such as mortgage banking, hospitality, and the public sector. Cognos' nine launch partners include Accenture Ltd., BearingPoint Inc. and Vaultus Mobile Technologies Inc.

Del Monte Foods has benefited from Cognos' approach, according to Del Monte Director of Business Systems and Decision Support Andy Wojewodka. For several years the San Francisco-based produce company had used various Cognos applications, such as its ReportNet analysis software, by themselves in isolated areas of the business. Eventually, Del Monte decided it would get better value from the software by implementing it more broadly and working more closely with Cognos.

Del Monte first started applying its expanded Cognos technology to study promotional spending effectiveness. Wojewodka is now in the early stages of working with the company's sales organization on a plan to extend the strategy and methodology to that group. He described Cognos as a helpful partner throughout the process, and said he found their best-practices models useful.

"We’re leveraging the technology to not only know what the [metrics] are and how we're tracking against that, but to take it to the next level and supply information so that a decision-maker can take action," Wojewodka said. The goal is to cut down on the follow-up steps required to gather additional information -- phone calls, tracking down additional reports, etc. -- and allow executives to directly pull out the data they need from one centralized system.

Cognos will also talk this week about its next major update, Cognos 8, now in beta testing. Financial analyst Mark Verbeck, of Smith Barney, said in a recent note that he expects the launch of Cognos 8 to contribute to strong sales for Cognos later this year.

The company came in short of revenue estimates last quarter, raising red flags on Wall Street. Like other enterprise software vendors, it is struggling with lengthening sale cycles and smaller deal sizes. "We believe this industry continues to face structural challenges, which have led to low growth so far this cycle," Morgan Stanley analyst Ross MacMillan wrote following Cognos's last quarterly results announcement.