Cognos Inc signed an agreement to buy UK forecasting and modeling company Right Information Systems Ltd for $8m in cash and shares last week (CI No 3,093). Cognos was already bundling Right Information’s 4Thought neural network-based data mining technology with Angoss Software Inc’s Knowledgeseeker. Cognos said it expects to take a hit of $5m net for write offs in process research and development. The company is now working to integrate the company’s technology in with its own point-and- click business intelligence tool PowerPlay. Cognos has a beta version of a Netscape Communications Corp browser-enabled version of PowerPlay that it hopes will take PowerPlay out to a wider audience – say to production line workers on the shopfloor – up until now, you needed a personal computer to run PowerPlay and installing a $2,000 machine for each staff member just wasn’t an option. Cognos says 75% of its customers don’t want personal computers. The company claims it is no big problem to integrate a browser into PowerPlay and run operations on the server, because the current release of the product – version 5.0 – is already server-based. PowerPlay lets users rank and compare sales of product lines, while the Angoss Knowledgeseeker technology looks for interesting correlation’s between bits of data, and Right’s technology predicts future trends based on what’s gone on so far. These days Cognos wants to brand itself as a business intelligence company, and has downgraded expectations for its application development tool Axiant, which is now promoted only to existing customers of its PowerHouse 4GL. Revenue currently splits down into 55% from its business intelligence division, which also sells the Impromptu reporting tool, and 45% from application development tools.
