Cognos bolsters search capabilities

Cognos has updated its business intelligence suite, adding improved search and tighter integration

Business intelligence (BI) giant Cognos launched an updated version of its Cognos 8 BI suite yesterday, featuring enhanced search capabilities and tightened integration with leading business applications, including those of Microsoft, SAP and Siebel.

The new Cognos Go search engine brings internet-style search capabilities to firms' reporting environments and can help users to exploit the increasing amounts of business data provided by BI tools, the company said.

A browser-based interface provides keyword search tools and ranks results based on users’ priorities, while the engine searches the full content of Cognos reports, not just the title and metadata.

Henry Morris of analyst firm IDC welcomed the new functionality, and in a statement said that improved search capabilities are needed to help firms exploit the large number of reports that BI tools can generate.

"With search functionality, end-users can easily tap into the wealth of information available through BI tools to quickly find resources and data to improve decision making and enhance corporate performance,” Morris said.

By improving integration with Microsoft, SAP and Siebel applications, Cognos is the latest BI vendor to upgrade its tools to make them accessible to a wider range of business users.

The company said integration with Microsoft Office would allow users to " view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses and metrics within Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel", while tightened integration with mySAP and Siebel CRM allows firms to produce reports combining historic data held in data warehouses and current data held in applications.

The update also increases support for new software and hardware platforms, including SAP NetWeaver, HP Integrity Servers running HP-UX 11i, Microsoft SQL server 2005, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, and BEA WebLogic Server 9 among others.