IBM Cognos Insight

IBM Cognos Insight - Sanjeev Datta

This book, written by Sanjeev Datta, Business Analytics expert and Practice Director of PerformanceG2, is a guideline about how to use IBM Cognos Insight, a desktop Analytics tool that combining an in-memory analysis engine with capabilities of data exploration and data visualization. IBM Cognos Insight can be used stand-alone for personal analytics or as a collaborative application, working with others IBM Business Analytics tools, like IBM Cognos Business Intelligence or IBM Cognos TM1.

The book covers all the aspects of IBM Cognos Insight, since how to install and configuring, the usability, until the examples of Strategic Decision Making using the tool. In the Chapter 1, he explores the concepts of Business Analytics and how the IBM Cognos Insight fits this concept. In the Chapter 2, he explains how to install and configure the tool.

In the Chapter 3, Usability of IBM Cognos Insight, he demonstrates in detail the features to import data, analyze it, build workspaces, and also how to reorient, restructure, and display data in rich visual formats. In the Chapter 4, he brings some interesting examples on how to use the tool for Strategic Decision Making. And in the last Chapter, he explains how to share the information in a enterprise collaboration environment.

The book is well detailed and illustrated, and a good resource to get started with IBM Cognos Insight.


Book Details
Book: IBM Cognos Insight
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Language: English
Paperback: 142 pages
Release Date: November 2012
ISBN: 184968846X
ISBN 13: 9781849688468
Author: Sanjeev Datta

Business Intelligence Trumps Facebook

Baseline published a post commenting on their research Top 10 Tech Trends of 2011, where they identified that the enthusiasm is for business analytics and knowledge management, where nearly two-thirds of new commitments are expected to be at a strong or very strong level. According Baseline research, while social networking may be a hot topic, finding a way to make sense of all that data with BI systems will be the 2nd biggest tech trend of 2011.

The survey showed about 9 percent more organizations expecting significant deployments of Business intelligence (BI) systems in 2011, compared with last year’s survey. And it’s high on end-users’ and finance’s wish lists. The driver of this interest seems to be the need to corral all these new, usually disorganized information sources.

According Bill Bosler, CIO at Texas Consultants: “Some social networking techniques will clearly impact all users, and deployments will continue at their own pace -- independent of corporate intent”, which recently designed an ambitious BI tool as part of a new oil refinery project in the Middle East. “There will be plenty of action on the analytics side, crunching all the new real-time data collected by both new and traditional means, and anticipating and mitigating challenges before they occur.”

IBM Advances Analytics With Acquisition of Coremetrics

IBM announced Tuesday an agreement to acquire Coremetrics, a privately held business analytics software company. Financial terms were not disclosed. With Coremetrics' acquisition, IBM will be able to deliver new business analytics solutions, including tools that give managers real-time insights into sales trends, and web analytics capabilities to help measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and customer interactions. Coremetrics' Customers include Bank of America, Holiday Inn, Office Depot, Victoria's Secret and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

"With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities to give clients greater insight about customer behavior and sentiment about products and services, and give true foresight into their future buying patterns," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere. "Marketing departments can benefit from these capabilities very quickly because we are delivering this in a Software-as-a-Service model. The combination of IBM and Coremetrics will maximize marketing expenditures and also make the buying experience more convenient, personal and interactive for consumers."

"Marketers increasingly need the ability to see across their organizations and the agility to make split-second decisions based on real-time data," said Joe Davis, CEO, Coremetrics. "The combination of Coremetrics and IBM will deliver deeper business insights to address the real challenges and opportunities all companies face in an increasingly digital world."

Coremetrics' acquisition is another move by IBM in direction to consolidate in the business analytics market, and to extend the company's analytics strategy, with an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years. The main steps in this direction were when IBM bought Cognos in 2007 and SPSS in 2009.

Boris Evelson, an analyst of Forrester Research, commented: "with the acquisition IBM has a chance to integrate Web analytics into its core BI platform. Currently, companies that want to do such integration have to rely on consultants and customized development. Fellow mega-vendors Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have made various attempts at entering the Web analytics market, but so far with little success. None of the large BI vendors, they don’t really have anything comparable”.

Analytics or Intelligence?

During a presentation at SAS Global Forum, a statement from Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS, has made several posts were written about the same issue.

Jim Davis said: “Business intelligence is an over-used term that has had its day, and business analytics is now the differentiator that will allow customers to better forecast the future especially in this current economic climate.” and also said: "I don't believe (business intelligence is) where the future is, the future is in business analytics."


James Taylor commented in a post entitled Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?: "This distinction between Business Intelligence (what everyone else does) and Business Analytics (what SAS does) struck me as a distinction without a difference.", and finished with: "I guess I just don't see the difference between BI and BA..."

Peter Thomas, in a post called Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence, made a good analysis on what Jim said. "Maybe the marketing terms business intelligence and business analytics (together with Enterprise Performance Management, Executive Information Systems and Decision Support Systems) should be consigned to the scrap heap and replaced by the simpler Management Information", Peter said.

Neil Raden was there at the forum, and wrote a good post: From 'BI' to 'Business Analytics,' It's All Fluff, where he said: "SAS as a company makes most of its money on its classic product that is almost completely complementary to BI.SAS has vastly expanded its product line over the years to include all sorts of BI tools such as performance management, OLAP, visualization and data integration, but judging by the attendees I met there, most of them are involved with the flagship product that crunches datasets, performs statistical, stochastic, data mining and predictive modeling." He also said: "My guess is that SAS wanted to craft a message that rained on the BI vendors that lack the experience and loyal customer base in analytics."

Neil Raden summarized with: "Bottom line, it's all fluff."

I agree with them. In my opinion, this is pure marketing. SAS is taking advantage of analytics as buzzword, to say that their products are better than the other BI vendors.