Cognos 10 adds Lotus Connections and mobile access
Cognos 10 will bring together IBM's Cognos business intelligence platform with Lotus Connections, as well as adding mobile device access, IBM announced on Monday.
Adding mobile access to IBM's Cognos analytics software will provide users with invaluable "real-time intelligence in a single, user-friendly interface", as well as enabling more people to work from home, the company says.
"The increase in the rate and pace of data is accelerating the IT opportunity around business analytics and optimisation. When combined with the unprecedented growth of the mobile workforce, this presents an opportunity for businesses to embrace the borderless office and extract intelligence to better interact with customers," said IBM in a statement.
In addition, Cognos 10 also adds Lotus Connections to the core functionality of the software, meaning that users can now interact with each other more easily on company blogs, Wikis, Communities (shared collaborative space with discussion forums) and Activities — a group task management tool — projects.
Lotus Connections also includes other functionality, such as micro-blogging of status updates, profile management, tagging of content and people in the organisation and social bookmarking options.
"This combination fuels the exchange of ideas and knowledge that naturally occurs in the decision-making process, but is typically lost in meeting notes, manual processes and emails. Users can now initiate activities, engage others with their expertise, post messages, files, links, and discuss or review opinions — all in real time for faster, more accurate decision making," said the company.
The company says that the tools will be accessible from a range of mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry smartphones.
In August, rival business intelligence specialists SAP outlined plans to make the whole of its portfolio accessible from mobile devices , facilitated in a large part by its $5.8bn (£3.7bn) acquisition of Sybase which completed in July.