IBM makes good on its Cognos buyout with 16 new products

Last November, we wondered what IBM expects to come out of its acquisition of Canadian business intelligence software provider Cognos. This morning we found out, as Big Blue enters the "business optimization" business.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- At a press conference here today, the recently combined IBM/Cognos organization put forth a fresh challenge to business software competitors SAP and Oracle, unveiling well over a dozen new products.

Officially dubbed "business optimization" by IBM, the market being addressed represents a huge and growing opportunity, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for the IBM Software Group.

"There's no question (we've been) looking to gain share against SAP and Oracle," Mills told reporters today.

But with the acquisition of Cognos complete, IBM is already ahead in the business optimization market, according to the senior VP.

"The integration between Cognos and IBM puts us in a position that other companies are going to be chasing," he said.

IBM plans to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes through an "Information on Demand" (IoD) architecture that will range from core database management and content management systems at the bottom layer to customer decision-making tools at the top layer.

Six of the new solutions IBM announced today give customers pre-integration between the Cognos business intelligence (BI) system and various existing products from IBM, for purposes involving wider use and better analysis of business information drawn from a variety of sources.

Other new products include specialized vertical solutions for markets that include banking, retail, health care, and life sciences.

IBM's new Retail Store Operations, for example, allows retail managers to order new supplies while at the same time projecting inventory levels of existing supplies several weeks ahead, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director for IoD and Cognos Marketing Integration, in a meeting with BetaNews at the press event.

IBM also announced a set of IoD Infrastructure Services, to be provided to customers through both the business and technical arms of IBM Global Consulting.

IT managers from pizza chain Papa Gino's and garden tools company Fiskars Brands, also on hand at the event, described how they're using the integrated products to quickly collect point-of-sale (POS) data from retail stores throughout the US and distribute the information to company managers for business analysis.

Over the next couple of years, IBM will announce considerably more products in the "Information on Demand" category, Mills said.

For instance, Cognos' BI tools are expected to take on much more sophisticated analysis capabilities, developed at IBM's research labs.

Aside from Retail Store Operations, other vertical solutions rolled out by IBM today included Crime Management and Insight; Municipal Performance Management Scorecard; BI for Health Analytics; Life Sciences Promotional Spend and Compliance; Financial Planning; Financial Risk Insight in Banking; Risk Adjusted Profitability for Banking; Workforce Analytics; and Manufacturing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Industry Solution.

IBM also rolled out a specialized repository and content management system known as the IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control.

For more: IBM contrasts its 'integration' with Cognos against SAP's 'acquisitions'