Customers Worldwide Endorse Cognos 8 BI
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-- Single product on proven architecture delivers the full range of BI capabilities for all users against any type of organizational data --
NEW YORK, Sept. 14 -- Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced widespread customer acclaim for Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, the industry's first Web-services based solution that provides the complete range of BI functionality in a single product on a single, proven architecture. See today's related release at: http://cognos.com/news/releases/2005/0914_3.html
"Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking release for customers across industries," said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, Global Marketing, Cognos. "We're the first company to provide customers with a single product that seamlessly integrates all the essential BI ingredients. Organizations can now standardize their information delivery enterprise-wide to cost-effectively improve and accelerate decision-making processes, while managing performance."
Cognos 8 BI has been tested by more than 100 global organizations including Austrian Airlines, Banco Galicia, Cullen/Frost Bankers, Beaute Prestige International, BMW of North America, LLC, DaimlerChrysler, GlaxoSmithKline Inc. (Canada), The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Manpower, Pfizer Japan, Schneider National, Inc., Smart Systems for Health Agency, United Agri Products, Unilever Latin America, and Woolworths S.A.
Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc.
Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc., is a financial holding company with $10 billion in assets offering a full range of banking and financial services to consumer and commercial customers throughout Texas."
Frost Bank requires reliable and cohesive insight into its business operations. Cognos 8 BI meets this challenge by providing more integration between BI tools and supplying additional functionality to the business users. It helps us stay ahead of the demand curve for easy to access, easy to analyze, quality information," said Louis Barton, Director of Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence, Frost Bank. "The resulting capabilities made possible by Cognos 8 BI bring Business Intelligence to the next level. The vision represented by this BI platform demonstrates significant leadership and commitment to Cognos' customers."
Austrian Airlines Group (AUA)
As the leading airline in Austria, AUA offers connections to 130 destinations in 66 countries on 5 continents and to more than 700 destinations in 130 countries in collaboration with Star Alliance(TM) partners. It has standardized on Cognos reporting and analysis for a single, consolidated view of business performance.
"The seamless integration between the OLAP and relational reporting capabilities is very impressive in Cognos 8 BI and will let users analyze data even more extensively and quickly than they could before," said Manfred Tiefenbacher, Head of Development and Integration, Custom and Cargo Systems, Austrian Airlines Group. "In addition, the advanced event management and scheduling capabilities are breakthrough features that will help organizations like us continue to expand and enrich our business intelligence deployments across the enterprise."
Banco Galicia
Argentina's first and largest private-sector bank, Banco Galicia serves more than 2 million individual and corporate clients. The leader in financial services uses Cognos BI solutions as its standard for enterprise reporting and analysis.
"Testing Cognos 8 BI reinforced our confidence in Cognos' future product roadmap," said Analia Mroz, Project Coordinator, responsible for Banco Galicia's Data Warehouse Project. "A single BI product on a single architecture, delivering all the necessary BI capabilities to users is a development that interests us tremendously. Our objective is to make our business users autonomous users of the information located in the data warehouse using a single, simple tool that integrates all the necessary aspects of BI. Cognos 8 BI fulfills this objective and will permit continued growth within the company by providing information to a growing number of users in a more efficient way."
Beaute Prestige International (BPI)
BPI S.A., founded in France in 1990 by leading Japanese cosmetics firm Shiseido, has the mission of designing, manufacturing, and distributing on international markets fragrances signed by world-renowned fashion designers Issey Miyake, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Narciso Rodriguez. BPI uses Cognos' reporting and planning capabilities across its departments for all types of data, from sales or budget figures to media or merchandising key indicators.
"Cognos 8 BI provides quick, direct access to all data sources and to relational, OLAP, and enterprise applications from every capability, whether it is reporting or analysis. This evolution presents users with all the data they require in one trusted place and will help them improve information quality, simplify maintenance and eliminate any existing silos of data that constrain decision-making effectiveness," said Christophe Davy, IS Director, BPI S.A.
GlaxoSmithKline Inc. (Canada)
As an integral part of the world's second largest research-based pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline in Canada uses Cognos analysis, reporting and metrics management for disseminating up-to-date information to its large, diverse sales force, to help solidify its BI standards and directives and to provide drill-through analysis.
"Simplifying and integrating the range of Cognos BI capabilities into a single product on our well-established Cognos ReportNet architecture helps manage our information needs cost-effectively and consistently with increased agility and responsiveness," said Bill Scott, Manager, Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence, GSK Canada. "Cutting through the clutter of applications to gain a consistent view of any business issue across information formats allows us to act on relevant and timely information and speed overall decision-making."
Manpower
Manpower is a world leader in the employment services industry specializing in temporary employment; recruitment; employee assessment; training; career transition; organizational consulting; and professional financial services. The $14.9 billion company has been a Cognos customer since 1996, using planning, reporting and analysis capabilities for 4,000 U.S. users across its finance, operations, customer reporting, sales and marketing departments.
"Cognos 8 BI enables full reporting and analysis on plans, budgets and forecasts and also applies business event management to the planning and budgeting process. Key performance targets are derived directly from the plans and can be applied automatically and seamlessly to the scorecards," said Vivian Adashek, manager, US Finance, Manpower. "The integration of analysis capabilities with Cognos Planning is fantastic and allows for the instantaneous creation of cubes. The new features should provide our users with better visibility into plans, the ability to compare plans to actuals and take appropriate action in a very timely manner."
Pfizer Japan
Pfizer is a global leader in the development, production, marketing and sales of healthcare products across 150 countries. The Japanese arm of the $52.5 billion company has deployed Cognos ReportNet for its enterprise reporting requirements across its sales and marketing departments.
"Cognos 8 BI capitalizes on the existing scalable, high performance platform Cognos introduced with ReportNet, and caps a long line of customer- driven innovations that focus on the needs of the global enterprise," said Masao Okazaki, Director, Field Force Effectiveness, Pfizer Japan. "The 100% Web architecture and extensive multilingual support of Cognos ReportNet has already helped us reduce IT costs. New enhancements such as extended self- service reporting and automatic drilling capabilities that allow for filtering by metadata, member or dimensional level will help customers more quickly expand their implementations as they standardize on the Cognos 8 BI foundation."
Schneider National, Inc.
Schneider National Inc. is a premier provider of transportation, logistics and related services. Schneider National serves more than two-thirds of the FORTUNE 500(R) companies, offering the broadest portfolio of services in the industry. Schneider National's transportation solutions include: One-Way Van, Dedicated, Expedited, Intermodal, Brokerage, Bulk and Specialized. Schneider Logistics, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Schneider National, provides supply chain management technology, managed services, engineering services and freight payment.
"Cognos business intelligence is a strategic and essential part of our business," said John Hasenzahl, Director of Knowledge Services and Data Management at Schneider National. "Cognos 8 Scorecarding is one aspect of Cognos 8 BI that provides us with the ability to achieve more granular visibility into our key business unit metrics. We will have the flexibility to view metrics weekly for one unit and monthly for another, across a single, integrated footprint. The new services-oriented architecture across the complete Cognos BI portfolio greatly increases manageability for large-scale enterprise deployments like ours. Cognos BI helps make our associates more efficient and effective."
Smart Systems for Health Agency
SSHA is an agency of the Ontario government that is transforming health care through the power of IT to improve the flow of patient information. Using that information, health care professionals become more effective, making more informed care decisions. SSHA is deploying secure and reliable computer technologies to connect all 150,000 healthcare providers working at 24,000 locations in Ontario. The agency currently uses Cognos ReportNet to generate key reports for its integrated public health information system.
"Our beta experience with Cognos 8 BI has provided a first-hand glimpse into a product that combines all the necessary BI capabilities including reporting, analysis, active scorecards and dashboards, event lifecycle management and data integration onto a single, simple architecture for improved decision-making," said Tony Schieman, Development Manager, Reporting and Development Environment, SSHA. "With Cognos 8 Reporting, we will have the ability to conduct drill-through analysis directly from reports to help speed the delivery of key healthcare information. In a business where access to timely information can be a life and death situation, breakthrough improvements such as this are very much appreciated."
Unilever Latin America
With 34 companies across 19 countries and currencies, Unilever Latin America provides cooking and eating, household, healthy living, beauty and style products to consumers. It currently uses Cognos as its BI foundation.
"We've found that Cognos 8 BI is simple to integrate and use, making it possible for large organizations like us to standardize our BI environment cost-effectively and securely," said Cesar Kawabata, Infrastructure Architecture Manager, Unilever Latin America. "Having deeper access to the consistent information required to improve decision-making processes across the organization, regardless of data sources, should provide us with a complete, consistent view of any business issue."
United Agri Products, Inc.
This $2.5 billion company is the largest independent distributor of seeds, fertilizer and crop protection chemicals in the United States and Canada. The company serves the $28 billion market for these "crop inputs" with a network of 330 retail and wholesale distribution facilities and a team of 1,100 sales professionals. UAP selected Cognos as its enterprise reporting standard in 2004 and uses Cognos reporting across its Sales, Credit, Supply Chain organizations.
"There are some powerful advancements in the reporting capabilities within Cognos 8 BI that further expand the overall flexibility and ease-of-use we've come to appreciate through our Cognos implementation," said Jim Benshoof, Chief Information Officer, United Agri Products, Inc. "We are excited to see new enhancements that will help us lower the cost of report delivery, give all users access to information from a single product, and, for the first time, give us the choice of deploying information out to users through cubes or relational sources. We can now satisfy the needs of even more users with Cognos 8 BI."
Woolworths Holdings Limited
Founded in 1931 and based in Cape Town, SA, Woolworths sells a wide range of food products, clothing and household goods in 200 stores across South Africa, as well as franchised outlets in Africa and the Middle East. Woolworths have utilized various Cognos products in their Foods and Financial Services divisions for many years, and are now deploying Cognos 8 across all divisions including Clothing, Human Resources and Finance, all operating off a new common corporate data warehouse.
"Self-service reporting for ad-hoc requests and the ability for all users to create a personal, flexible information portal that can pull in key metrics, RSS feeds, and company dashboards are key new capabilities in Cognos 8 BI that deliver the power of business intelligence to all users, while providing a single self-service BI environment for the organization," said Peter Versfeld, IT Executive, Business Intelligence, Woolworths Holdings Limited. "Cognos has armed customers with the single product they need to embrace business intelligence across the enterprise."
ABOUT COGNOS:
Cognos, the world leader in enterprise business intelligence and corporate performance management, delivers software and services that help companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance.
Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage -- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) -- achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.
Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence and performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com/.
