Cognos Acquires Celequest: A Smart Move!

Dashboards are the face of BI for a very important user constituency: managers and executives. Given the importance of this aspect of a total BI solution, it came as little surprise to me that Cognos nabbed Celequest, a small player with a powerful dashboard solution.

Until now, Cognos' own dashboard solution has been limited to that of a single Report Studio document. While Cognos 8 brought some improved visualizations embedded in Report Studio documents, it misses the mark for one essential dashboard requirement: multiple data sources. While it's possible to address multiple data sources at a higher level in Cognos 8 Framework Manager (the business meta data layer), this approach makes the current dashboard solution less nimble and forces the Framework Manager model to be more complex.The acquisition of Celequest will allow Cognos customers to gain some best-of-breed dashboard capabilities. From a competitive stand point, it shores up Cognos' total BI solution against Business Objects who has solid capabilities in Dashboard Manager and Xcelcius, Microsoft's ProClarity, and MicroStrategy's pending dashboard release (due Q1 2007).

Dashboard capabilities, though, are not the only thing Celequest brings to the party and it will be interesting to see how Cognos leverages the rest of Celequest's portfolio. Might they be thinking of using this as a way of competing more in the SMB market? Possibly. Might the in-memory analytics engine be used to improve performance and caching of in Cognos 8? That would take a bit more time to evolve.

Bottom line: the acquisition looks like a really smart move.

Cindi Howson is the author of BIScorecard product reviews. Write her at [email protected].Dashboards are the face of BI for a very important user constituency: managers and executives. Given the importance of this aspect of a total BI solution, it came as little surprise to me that Cognos nabbed Celequest, a small player with a powerful dashboard solution.

Until now, Cognos' own dashboard solution has been limited to that of a single Report Studio document. While Cognos 8 brought some improved visualizations embedded in Report Studio documents, it misses the mark for one essential dashboard requirement: multiple data sources.