Competition for Qlikview from IBM Cognos!?

Posted by Gilles on 15/09/2009 under Articles, News | 2 Comments to Read

There is a lot of buzz around the release of IBM Cognos Express. It came across my twitter accounts here and here quite a few times and when I released a search in tweetdeck for IBM Cognos Express it appeared 65 times.  You can read the press release from IBM here. IBM Cognos Express is the affordable, all-in-one BI suite which can be deployed and installed very fast targeted at small to medium business with 100-999 users.

Cognos Express is IBM’s answer to the success of Qlikview in SMB market, but also to compete against Microsoft (Gemini), SAP’s Business Objects Edge series and any other player in this under served market. Cognos has long been absent in this market and sure has lost quite some market share to especially Microsoft and Qlikview.

I do think that Cognos Express has some answers and chances to win here: Microsoft dropped it’s future development for  performance point server where Cognos now comes with the Advisor module with planning and forecasting, Cognos has a chance to win here. And where Qlikview wins a lot with their in memory technology and of course their ease of use, Cognos comes with in memory technology from Applix TM1, an in-memory analysis product Cognos acquired shortly before it was purchased by IBM. All data available with Xcelerator an excel front-end for advanced Olap query.

Cognos Express will consist of three products and licensing starts from $12,500 for one of the products with 5 named users. The products are:

• IBM Cognos Express Xcelerator
• IBM Cognos Express Advisor – is the forecasting and what-if tool
• IBM Cognos Express Reporter

Cognos Express Xcelerator effectively turns a user’s Excel spreadsheet into an interface for running advanced OLAP queries. The software lets users analyze their data and perform “what if” modeling from the comfort of Excel, which is probably what they were previously using for analyzing their numbers. There is also a Web-based interface for Xcelerator.

Cognos Express Advisor is the most advanced component of the suite, and delivers the most powerful interface to the underlying TM1 OLAP server. This software lets users slice and dice and drill down into their data. It also delivers more advanced data “visualizations” than the other two modules

Cognos Express Reporter is a Web-based ad hoc query and reporting tool that can be used against an organization’s existing relational or flat-file data store, or against the Cognos Express suite’s underlying OLAP data store. Reporter comes with canned reports and dashboards–delivered in the user’s choice of Web browser, PDF, Excel, e-mail, or Web portal formats–that are easy enough for novices to learn quickly, IBM says.

Intelligent Enterprise comments here quoting Anderson of Gartner Data Quest:

“there was a lot of hope and interest in PerformancePoint, and there was a sense of disappointment when Microsoft decided not to go forward with it… My sense is that there’s a latent market of interest in tying performance management to BI, but there have not been any properly scaled, affordable solutions for midsize companies.”

And:

“QlikTech also offers reporting, but they don’t have a BI stack that includes data integration and data quality software or aspirations to address performance management.”

Search Data Management comments here focusing primarily on the predefined datamodels with some nice comments on the pricing:

“I think it is affordable to what I call the upper tier of the midmarket,” Harmon said. “It has the potential to still be on the expensive side if you’re going to be using all those modules.”

Cognos Express starts at $12,500 per module, Plummer said. Customers that qualify can also finance the purchase, as well as pay in installments that IBM says can be as low as $25 per user, per month.

Gartner’s Anderson has a different take. “What [IBM] said is you can have upwards of 50 users for under 100 grand. From my perspective, that’s a very aggressive price point,” Anderson said. “It should be really attractive to midmarket companies.”

Other comments can be found here and here.

The IBM Cognos Express products are expected to ship within days, and a free trial edition will be made available as a download on September 29.