Cognos has entered into two business intelligence search deals.
The goal of the partnerships is to enable business intelligence (BI) users to spend more time on analysis and less time and effort searching for relevant information.
Fast is linking its Enterprise Search Platform with Cognos 8’s analytic capabilities. The goal, according to Fast, is to provide enterprise users with simple one-click access to relevant data to enable more efficient decision-making.
Fast also opens up the analysis to unstructured information such as documents, images, audio, video, and emails, in addition to the BI information managed by Cognos’ BI suite. Cognos users will also benefit from Fast’s Contextual Insight software for ranking search results according to the context of the query.
The two companies said they would develop number of customizable solutions for customers. Systems integrators are likely to play a big role in their plans as well.
Separately, Cognos has allied with Autonomy in a similar vein, to converge enterprise results across unstructured and structured data for BI applications. Like Fast, Autonomy is tapping into the Cognos Go! search component.
Cognos debuted its Go service in March. The service allows users to sift through repositories of reports, analyses, scorecards, dashboards and other XML-based BI-related information, and rank results according to priorities and relevance.
Both partnerships are really the latest effort by enterprise search providers to make their search engines more relevant and user-friendly to business users.
Even search giant Google has got in on the act, announcing its OneBox for enterprise technology in April. Cognos is listed among Google’s BI partners.
From a BI perspective, meshing search and analysis is part of a strategy to bring BI closer to the ‘masses’ of business users. Traditionally BI tools have been complex to use and therefore restricted to a handful of users.
Only 20% of enterprise workers are estimated to use BI software due to its complexity and steep learning curve. By leveraging familiar internet search paradigms, BI companies like Cognos, as well as Information Builders and SAS Institute, both of which have also announced search capabilities, hope to draw in a wider universe of business users.
