Cognos on Tuesday unveiled the third release of its Cognos 8 BI tools, which have been updated to provide more targeted performance management information to a broader set of users.

Cognos, whose shareholders voted Monday to approve IBM's proposal to buy the Ottawa-based BI vendor for US$5 billion, said that Cognos 8 v3 includes new features that can help enterprise and mid-sized companies analyze transactional data from ERP systems to help front-line workers and executive make better decisions.

The updated software includes a self-service reporting interface to help finance and business analysts better access financial and operational data sources and create financial statement-style reports.

For business groups, the updated tool set now allows users to create and manage their own perspectives of performance information by creating new OLAP cubes with consistent information from company-wide enterprise BI tools, Cognos said. Business analysts, for example, can now build smaller, faster data sets of very specific business performance information for more targeted exploration.

A new Cognos BI portal-based dashboard lets business users and executives access all of the strategic management and scorecard information of their company in one view, the company added.

Finally, the software includes a feature called Briefing Books, which allows IT administrators to more easily respond to requests from senior management for a comprehensive view of performance information. Cognos said Briefing Books provides a way for executives to easily navigate multi-page reports with business data.

Other new features for administrators include:

-- Support services to help reduce the time required to build data models;

-- Tools to create a snapshot view of system health to give administrators a single, consolidated view of the status of an entire system; and

-- The ability to view multiple system metrics and set thresholds to monitor them.

"The broad system management advances we've tested in Cognos' enterprise platform help us speed development and overall productivity to achieve and exceed service commitments," said Thomas Haag, project manage of data warehousing and business intelligence at Lufthansa, in a statement. "The administrative enhancements let our operations team proactively monitor the overall system health in real time, easing repetitive questions and speeding decisions, on peak usage days in particular."

Cognos 8 v3 is now available.

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