Cognos Drops Its Financial-Planning Software For Adaytum's

With its $157.1 million acquisition of Adaytum Inc. a done deal, Cognos Inc. is dropping its own nascent financial-planning product in favor of Adaytum's E.Planning software. Cognos said Monday it's also moving quickly to replace reporting software from rival Business Objects SA that Adaytum sold as part of E.Planning with its own PowerPlay data-analysis tool.

The Adaytum acquisition, announced just before Christmas, was completed after hours on Friday. Cognos is now merging Adaytum's Minneapolis operations with its own, announcing this week that it's eliminating 70 positions from Adaytum's 300-plus member workforce. Some employees and managers will permanently join Cognos while others, including CEO Guy Haddleton, will stay on during the transition.

Cognos debuted its own financial-planning software last spring, but company execs admit it lagged behind more-established products from Adaytum and Hyperion Solutions Corp. So Adaytum's product will supplant Cognos' own software, although some capabilities from Cognos Planning will be added to future releases of the Adaytum application.

Cognos is providing PowerPlay to Adaytum's 1,500 owners for free to replace the Business Objects software. "PowerPlay is a very good complement to the current Adaytum product portfolio," says Rob Ashe, Cognos' president and chief operating officer.

Financial planning is a key element of enterprise or corporate performance management, using business-intelligence tools to monitor business processes and strategic planning tools to improve those processes. Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects are among the vendors racing to provide customers with the broadest set of enterprise performance management applications. Cognos offers budgeting and planning software, financial analysis applications, and a performance scorecard product.

Cognos is also developing links between the planning software and its Metrics Manager scorecard software, allowing the latter to be populated with data from the planning application. The Adaytum software also will be integrated with Cognos' portal and financial applications.