Cognos Planning 8.2 Cognos Planning sits in the middle of Cognos’ corporate performance management stack and supports distributed planning environments.
The most visible enhancement is bringing Planning’s interface in synch with the rest of Cognos 8 product suite. That includes the integration of Planning with Cognos’ reporting studio environment.
Cognos has also improved data access via a common data acquisition method for all third-party sources. That allows users to populate or refresh historical BI data in the Planning environment. Access to SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) has also been bolstered with a new high-performance connector that connects Planning directly to BW cubes, and allows users to import BW cubes into its Framework Manager.
Planning already had SAP data connectivity built-in. But this new connector is certified by SAP and supports OpenHub, a service of SAP’s BI platform that allows for controlled access of SAP data to downstream systems and applications. Cognos said the enhanced connectivity insulates users from the complexity of SAP data integration and ensures that SAP data is modeled only once and consistently used across the Planning and Cognos 8 BI environments.
Cognos has also increased reporting options in Planning 8.2, including a new incremental publishing capability that lets users publish data sets from Planning as Cognos 8 reports and scorecards without IT intervention.
From an end-user perspective Planning 8.2 now offers users a choice of a native Web or new Excel client. The latter supports rich planning functions included in the native Planning Web client, but in a familiar Excel interface.
Other features included in Planning 8.2 include support for input validation and attached documents, the latter allowing users to document qualitative assumptions and conversations around forecast assumptions and planning rationale.
Doug Barton, vice president of performance management marketing, said the enhancements included in 8.2 will benefit systems managers as well as financial process owners.
Separately, Cognos also unveiled a new Excel analysis module for its Cognos 8 BI system that provides new data exploration and analysis capabilities. The new Cognos B BI Analysis for Excel software is aimed at business and financial analysts that live and breathe in Excel.
The Excel interface can connect directly to Planning 8 and Cognos’ Controller financial consolidation software.
Cognos Planning 8.2 and BI Analysis for Excel are available now. Pricing is the same role-based licensing model as Cognos’ other products and include a year of support. Planning starts at $1,500 per user for common financial roles. Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Excel starts at $400 per user and also requires customers to have a Cognos 8 BI Consumer or higher role-based
Cognos expanded its planning capabilities through its acquisition of Applix last month. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
Barton said it was too early to detail any specific product roadmap on how Cognos will use Applix’s TM1 engine in its performance management products.
What I can say is that it will add considerable power and impact to our financial planning offerings for the office of finance.
TM1 is recognized as most scalable and interactive OLAP tool out there. It enjoys a large, happy customer base in finance departments making it a great match up for our distributed, driver-based Planning software.
Once planning data is collected by financial managers they will want to analyze it, and that means writing business rules around the data.
