Enterprise Framework Services

The foundation for your information needs


"Cognos offers users a complete BI platform and is one of the most functionally complete solutions evaluated. Specific areas of strength include navigation and analysis, query functionality, and data modeling features."
SPEX Report (a division of the META Group)

Cognos Framework Services provide a common infrastructure across all Cognos capabilities for scorecarding, planning, and business intelligence.

The framework services make Cognos software plug-and-play, saving IT both time and resources. Your applications share a common security, metadata, administration, and portal.

This integration means you can adapt your current deployment as your own infrastructure changes, such as when you add new ERP vendors or IT environments. You can extend Cognos capabilities to other areas of your organization. You can add new business intelligence, scorecarding, or planning capabilities as your needs evolve.

With this framework underpinning all performance management capabilities, Cognos, an IBM company, delivers the lowest cost of ownership, fastest time to results, consistent data across the enterprise, and performance software that works the way people think.

Framework services include:

  • Metadata
  • Software development kits (SDKs)
  • Portal
  • Security
  • Administration

Software development kits

Leveraging Web Services, Cognos opens up capabilities for integration and extension in Web-based enterprise applications. Using an open XML-based interface and fully documented SDKs, application developers and system integrators can incorporate Cognos content into any application or environment, using common protocols such as HTTP, WSDL, SOAP, and XSLT.

Portal

Cognos offers a common Web portal to provide intuitive, consistent information delivery of business intelligence for your users. The Cognos portal is easily customizable and adaptable to your interface standards. You can access, share, and interact with the reports and analysis that help you understand your business and make the best decisions.

Cognos offers Portal Services that allow organizations to easily manage and display Cognos business intelligence, planning, and scorecarding in your existing enterprise information portals. Including Cognos reports, analysis, dashboards, scorecards, and other capabilities drives higher returns in your information and portal investments.

Cognos portals offer:
Zero Footprint: Cognos portals have no footprint on the user's desktop. Anyone inside or outside the organization with a Web browser can access and interact with content.

Intuitive User Interface: No special training is required to use the portal. Standard browser interface actions-such as following hypertext links, copying, and pasting-allow users to access and organize business intelligence content quickly and easily.

Security

Cognos framework services offer a common security facility. This enables single-signon, secure access to all business intelligence, planning, and scorecarding content. It provides an easy way to manage security for both internal and external users, giving IT central control over all intranet and collaborative extranet applications.

Cognos addresses two critical aspects of information security:
Authentication (logon) security: Based on logon credentials or operating-system account, Cognos determines which user class or classes a user belongs to. Authorization security: In conjunction with other business intelligence components and based on the user's class, Cognos security facility determines what information is accessible to the user.
The open security from Cognos supports all of the popular authentication sources including LDAP (Netscape, Sun One (formerly Iplanet)), Active Directory, NTLM (NT Domain), Netegrity, and the existing Cognos security facility. It also features a complete SDK for custom security sources.

Administer, configure and distribute

Cognos provides IT with the ability to monitor and configure your planning, scorecarding, and business intelligence capabilities.

Configuration: Cognos allows IT to configure all aspects of business intelligence server infrastructure. Administrators can save and re-use configurations, effectively "blueprinting" the configuration of a server or group of servers for re-use. IT can easily add new machines at any time, "growing" the configuration as the user base increases.

Administration: You can administer the entire Cognos environment in an easy, non-resource-intensive way. Moreover, IT can distribute administration of the reporting environment to regional or departmental report owners, who can set access permissions and report properties for their local users over the Web.

A common Web portal distributes Cognos capabilities, such as scheduled management reports, customizable reports, ad hoc queries, and multidimensional analysis. This further reduces the cost of ownership and simplifies administration for IT.

Metadata

Cognos metadata service lets you create a single metadata model that spans all enterprise data sources and applications. This gives you a consistent data view across the enterprise, and a common foundation for information sharing on an enterprise scale.

Cognos allows IT to isolate report authors and report consumers from database complexities. Cognos metadata leverages your investment with a single model serving multiple audiences and locales. IT can set up enterprise standard business rules for data coming from multiple sources. Data reaches the business users in an easy-to-understand format.

Cognos accomplishes this through architecture that isolates the business rules from the data sources and the end applications. A single model can create multiple packages specific to individual needs. You can import from all major modeling tools (such as Informatica, ERwin, and others). In addition, Cognos lets you conduct an impact analysis to identify resulting changes in your metadata and import just these changes into the source model.