IBM launched their latest version of Business Analytics in Las Vegas during the Information on Demand Conference. IBM Cognos 10 was revealed with great anticipation and from the demonstrations and discussions that followed the product seems to offer major improvements to how end users interact with the volume information that is stored within their companies and also significant improvements in performance.
From a planning perspective, the focus was heavily weighted on TM1. For the Enterprise Planning Community that attended the conference, this initially sounded alarm bells. Where was IBM taking Enterprise Planning? Was the EP road turning into a dead end? Well, there is no doubt that IBM will be pushing TM1 as the planning tool as TM1 is more technically advanced in terms of performance than IBM Cognos Planning. However, the road is not closed for EP, just a mere diversion from the super highway, but with significant improvements – IBM released IBM Cognos Planning 10.1.
IBM Cognos Planning 10.1 was not promoted significantly at the IoD conference. There was one major seminar that lasted an hour to discuss the improvements IBM Cognos 10.1 offered (this required a repeat session due to demand). But that was it.
The biggest improvement is how Contributor can now cope with sparsity more effectively when cut-down has been applied. This is due to the new process that uses Access Blocks as opposed to the old cut-down process that can take a significant amount of time to run during a Go To Production process. IBM have stated that this improvement in performance allows IBM Cognos Planning models to become more scalable with models in excess of 30 million cells performing efficiently (providing cut down has been applied). I will be running performance testing and stress testing comparing IBM Cognos Planning 8.4 and IBM Cognos Planning 10.1 to see the results for myself.
Other new features of IBM Cognos Planning 10.1 include the ability to highlight cells in the Contributor Web Client and seeing a summation of the results very much like MS Excel. This function is limited to summation and maybe one day we can expect to see average or count as additional features.
IBM has improved the efficiency of running macros within the Contributor Administration Console. It is now possible for parallel running of macros making the platform more stable when it comes to automated processes. In addition, a macro can be started or restarted at a specific step making the process more efficient if a macro fails. An additional macro is also now available to run the Model Review Tool giving the application administrators easier access to the structure of an application to manage efficiency and trouble-shooting.
Also within the Contributor Administration Console, preview nodes are now available to view different e-list items with access tables applied. This will have a significant impact on the development of applications with access tables to save time in running the GTP process to view the impact of implementing changes to access tables.
Improvements from an integrity perspective include the ability to apply a non-admin user account to the planning server to run automated processes.
IBM are clearly focussing their strategy on implementing more planning solutions using TM1, however, the “sunset” strategy on IBM Cognos Planning is still a long way off – just look at how IBM Cognos Finance is still going. With the developments seen in IBM Cognos Planning 10, IBM are going to support this latest version for a further 8 years, plus when the next release is launched, another 8 years from that date. The wheels are certainly in motion for even more improvements with aggregated data being handled more efficiently to improve reconciliation time. I am looking forward to working with this latest release and the subsequent releases in due course.
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