News

Cognos unveils re-architected BI platform

• By Rich Seeley
• September 24, 2003

Cognos Inc., the Burlington, Mass.-based BI vendor, this month launched ReportNet, a new Web-based query and reporting tool, culminating a three-year effort to re-architect the firm's successful line of business intelligence tools.

The offering "represents a new platform for Cognos," stated Michael Branchaud, ReportNet product marketing manager. He added that the new technology represents a three-year development effort where a core team within Cognos was given carte blanche to re-architect the company's reporting tools and its entire BI platform for Web services and Java environments.

"The premise was that solutions [available] today are largely closed, client/server, proprietary [and] platform-based," Branchaud said.

On those platforms, the BI tools had to be designed not only for traditional query and reporting but to handle platform issues such as scalability that are no longer necessary in the emerging world of Web services, Branchaud said.

"The designers have had to take care of issues that now with the Web services architecture, they don't need to take care of," he said. "We used a Web services architecture because we want to reuse all the technology that the platform, OS and database companies are building into their infrastructure components."

This allowed the Cognos development team to focus on the company's core strength in reporting technology, which in a Web services environment can be accessed as "a zero-footprint client through any browser," Branchaud said.