Cognos Inc this week unveiled the latest version of its enterprise reporting software, Impromptu, promising for the first time greater scalability and failover to multiple servers. The Burlington, Massachusetts business intelligence vendor said that release 6.0 of its Impromptu Web Reports supports multiple servers as opposed to a single server like the previous versions. In the past, if lots of users were trying to download reports at the same time and the server crashed, then the system would stay down until the network administrator could get it back on line again, said Mark Godby, director, component marketing. But now if a server crashes, the request is immediately routed to another box.
For hundreds of users running thousands of reports, this is a much more scalable and robust product, Godby said, adding that there is potentially no maximum theoretical limit to the number of servers that could be used. Godby said that Cognos had done some benchmarks which showed the software in a distributed environment of five to six servers, with 250 users and approximately 1000 transaction requests per report. For every server added, the system could handle twice the number of transactions he said. With this release of the software we wanted to address the needs of the enterprise, not just single departments, which is what we’ve done in the past, he added.
In addition, Godby said that release 6.0 makes it easier for users to pull off the specific reports they need without having to involve the administrator which wastes time. In the past, users would receive a report and they might want to change it for some reason, or gain access to the part that refers to them in particular, he said, but that meant calling the IT department and requesting the change which led to a backlog of reporting. The software has now been rewritten to include a user-friendly graphical interface, which guides users through the options and helps them pinpoint the exact report, or portion of the report they need.
For example, a salesperson might receive a document about this month’s figures but he or she might only be interested in certain geographies, or certain months in the quarter. Before, it wouldn’t have been easy to extract that data and most users would have enlisted the help of an IT person, Godby said. But the new interface makes it much easier to navigate around the report. It guides users through using a series of pull down menus and simple point and click type instructions, he said. On the downside this latest version of the software is still designed for Windows NT servers only, although Cognos says a Sun Solaris release will be available in the not too distant future.
Interestingly, Godby also said that Cognos’s reporting software is not designed to compete with rival Brio Technology Inc’s product, acquired through its acquisition of Sqribe despite the fact that other Cognos spokespeople have stated otherwise. Sqribe’s software, now called Brio.Report, is widely acknowledged to be one of the most robust reporting products, drawing on data from multiple sources and distributing it to thousands of recipients at a time. Typical applications include the production of bills, invoices and checks; all heavy-duty procedures that require lots of calculations and intensive, fast processing. Brio says that Sqribe’s SQR-based reporting tool puts it two years ahead of both Business Objects and Cognos, which both have products that are clearly aimed at low-end enterprise analytic reporting. However, speaking to ComputerWire last month, a spokesperson for Cognos denied that to be the case. They’re only saying that because that’s what they’ve got, he said, Sqribe’s technology is old and highly flexible, but because of that it means you have to write code like a weasel to get stuff done. But yesterday Godby said: This product is clearly focused on business intelligence reporting, adding that it’s not intended to compete with Sqribe at that level.
