By Dan Jones
Cognos Inc is readying new business intelligence (BI) tools that it hopes will thrive in the shadow of Microsoft Corp’s SQL Server 7.0. The Ottawa, Canada-based software vendor has been seen as a dominant player in the BI market but faces new challenges with the advent of Microsoft’s OLAP server, the main hurdle being that SQL 7.0 looks likely to shake up the mid to low-end BI sector in much the same way that NT has sent tremors through the server market, dropping price points across the board. Tom Camps, director of product management for Cognos, disputes this, claiming that SQL 7.0 will offer new options for data warehousing and promote a broader awareness of business intelligence among value added resellers and systems integrators. In addition, Camps professes confidence that Microsoft won’t tread on his company’s toes by producing rival software tools. He claims that Redmond is looking to deliver a platform, not tools. Despite this, there are already signs of overlap, Excel 2000, which is due for release this quarter (CI No 3,534) will include support for OLAP. However, Camps claims that the program offers only limited OLAP support and is not an appropriate ‘pump’ to push data to flat spreadsheets as it does not link the underlying OLAP database to the spreadsheet. According to Camps, Excel 2000 does not represent industrial strength business intelligence. However, the OLAP functionality in the new version of Excel is targeting the same audience that Cognos is looking to reach with its new BI product, dubbed PowerPlay Enterprise Server, albeit on a more limited scale. PowerPlay Enterprise Server will integrate web, network and Windows access and include the PowerPlay for Excel tool. However, Mike Norman, senior analyst at the Data Warehouse Tools Bulletin, expects Cognos to have problems sustaining the whole PowerPlay idea claiming that SQL 7.0 changed the game for the company. Norman says that the PowerPlay mode of operation is going to go out of fashion as it faces pricing pressure from new vendors offering front-end tools costing $100 and running against SQL 7.0. He predicts that the downwards price slide forced by the move to SQL 7.0 will be bruising for Cognos. The PowerPlay Enterprise Server is in beta now and should be available in February. It will run on NT and Unix.
