Redwood city, California-based Celequest develops so-called performance dashboard software, branded as LAVA, that is offered as either as licensed appliance or software-as-a-service. The software lets business managers view key performance information about operations as a series of constantly updated charts and graphs presented in a customized web-based dashboard. For example, a risk manager can use the LAVA dashboard to get up-to-date information on a client’s credit limit and history.
Both companies have been close partners for over a year. As a result of that cooperation Celequest’s technology already provides out of the box interoperability (including drill-down, portal integration, single sign-on security) with the Cognos 8 BI suite.
Cognos said that initial work will ease tighter product integration in the future and expects to roll out an integrated offering to market in March.
At that time our field [organization] will be enabled to sell and support the solution. Ramping up will occur throughout the first quarter, said Mychelle Mollot, vice president of market strategy and strategic communications at Ottawa-based Cognos.
She also said the Celequest solution will continue to be sold as a stand-alone offering by both Cognos and Celequest channel partners and will also form part of broader Cognos BI and performance management solutions.
Details of specific regarding packaging, licensing, pricing and longer-term product integration will follow in late spring of this year.
Commenting on the acquisition yesterday, Rob Ashe CEO of Cognos, said: [Celequest] will deliver a more complete view of enterprise information for better overall performance management.
Celequest’s self-serve dashboard creation technology fits particularly well with Cognos’ vision of pervasive BI adoption through the operationally focused applications. And when married to Cognos’ own strategically focused dashboards, it allows Cognos to extend its reach into a new class of customer (operational managers) that needs to continuously make real-time decisions on the shop floor as well as monitor performance against corporate goals.
The SaaS capabilities of Celequest will also bolster Cognos’ on-demand capabilities, providing the company with new delivery mechanisms and enhancing its reach into the mid-market via channel partners. Celequest did a fair bit of business through channels.
Founded in 2002 by ex-Informatica Corp executive Diaz Nesamoney, Celequest is a small company that has around 25 employees. Now under Cognos wing it will undoubtedly benefit from the backing of a much stronger sales and marketing organization.
Celequest has experienced an interesting product evolution. The company started out by positioning itself as a business activity monitoring (BAM) specialist, hoping at that time to take advantage of the wave of interest in event-driven BI and analytic processing. But it has since toned down its BAM-message and now prefers to call itself an operational BI vendor, with a primary focus on self-serve dashboard tools that serve a broad spectrum of operational business users.
The shift is also reflective of the Celequest’s product development. Its first commercial product, then called Celequest BAM Suite, focused on providing an enabling infrastructure for event processing. But in mid-2004 the company added an operational dashboard front-end to the product which a sharper focus on transactions.
Nevertheless the company’s underlying Java-based technology has nevertheless remained more or less the same. It is based on streaming data flow engine and in-memory cache that streams transactional data for analysis.
Celequest currently has four patents for its streaming database analytic/rules technology.
Cognos also inherits an impressive finance-centric Celequest customer base (around 50-strong) that includes Citigroup and Fifth Third Bank.
