COGNOS and Hyperion are the main players
that give a tough fight to SAP in the BI/BPM space. In fact the competition from these two players prevents many companies to
take a decision - so much so that they go into a decision spiral. It would have been great if Oracle could buy Hyperion -
because then the field would be clear and the decisions one way or the other would be faster!!
It fairly obvious that
these two players will try and make their products more chic and cool as well as powerful since their entire concentration is
here... here COGNOS forges a strong tie in to the MSFT products - even powerpoint.. something that is likely to go very well
with the clients!
Cognos Monday unveiled an updated release of its Cognos 8 business intelligence
suite that adds search technology to its flagship product. The new Cognos Go search capability offers users a way to use key
words to search through business intelligence content. The move is the latest indication that the line between business
intelligence and search technologies is narrowing with the two increasingly used in a complementary fashion. Cognos Go, which
works with Cognos 8, searches the full content of BI reports, not just report titles and metadata descriptions, and uses
fuzzy logic and word stemming to fine-tune search terms, Cognos says. It also indexes BI content and can publish that content
to XML, which allows it to be used with other applications. The new version of Cognos 8 is more tightly integrated with
Microsoft Office and supports PowerPoint. It provides enhanced support for SAP NetWeaver, including improved integration with
the NetWeaver Enterprise Portal. And Cognos is offering new report packs for MySAP and Siebel CRM applications.