Cognos Inc, the Ottawa, Canada-based provider of business intelligence software, yesterday announced the first product to come from its January acquisition of Relational Matters. At the time, Cognos said it was buying RM for its data mart product, DecisionStream, and between now and then the company has been working on a Cognos-friendly user interface as well as integrating the product with its line of BI software. Cognos’ rebranded version of the software – it’s calling the software by the same name as RM – will be available in August and pricing will be announced at the time, said Rob Rose, VP of product marketing. Rose said the software was designed to extend the boundaries of Cognos’ standard BI offering by allowing companies to develop their own data marts. This, in turn, will enable developers to better tune the marts for the particular querying tasks at hand, he said. It will also improve performance, he claims.
Traditionally, people designing data marts would go off and build a product specifically for the sales organization, or marketing or whoever, Rose said. It was subject-oriented, they built the marts without a view as to what was going to be extracted from them. By contrast, Rose said DecisionStream was intended to turn that equation around, so that developers come to the table knowing how the data mart is expected to deliver value for the company. Now, through the integration, they can design the marts with the business intelligence tools in mind, he said. In addition, DecisionStream has what Cognos refers to as a dimensional framework, which basically means that consistent data – profits, revenues, product information and the like – can be shared between data marts without having to be put in again for every mart, as was the case in the past, Rose said. That way, developers only need add the data that’s specific to whichever part of the organization it’s being designed for. So when they come to roll out new marts, three-quarters of the work could potentially be done already, Rose added. It also means the data is 100% consistent; decisions are based on the same numbers, the same data structure, the same calculations and so on.
