Cognos Launches BI Appliance

Cognos is offering business intelligence as a prepackaged hardware appliance or as a hosted service.

Sold under the brand Cognos Now, the new offerings include self-service dashboards, integrated data, analysis and reports. The products target small and mid-size businesses, and can be used for analyzing customer data within Salesforce.com.

The Cognos Now appliance is based on technology from Celequest, which was recently acquired by Cognos. The hardware includes the preconfigured server, the BI application, and all other necessary software for a fixed price regardless of the number of users, dasboards, or data sources.

The appliances comes in three editions, SMB, Standard and Enterprise. Each has different processor and memory configurations to address a range of customer requirments, Cognos said. The new products were introduced Monday.