About Cognos

About Cognos

Cognos (Cognos Incorporated) was an Ottawa, Ontario-based company making business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) software. Founded in 1969, at its peak Cognos employed almost 3,500 people and served more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries.

Originally Quasar Systems Limited, it adopted the Cognos name in 1982. On January 31, 2008, Cognos was officially acquired by IBM.[2] The Cognos name continues to be applied to IBM's line of business intelligence and performance management products.

In 2007, following SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects and Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion, IBM announced its acquisition of Cognos in November for $4.9 billion. It continued to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary (Cognos, an IBM company) until January 1, 2009, when it was absorbed into IBM's Information Management brand within the company's Software Group. The software is now called "Cognos Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management" or Cognos BI and FPM.

IBM Cognos 8 BI, initially launched in September 2005, combined the features of several previous products, including ReportNet, PowerPlay, Metrics Manager, NoticeCast, and DecisionStream. There are also Express and Extended versions of Cognos 8 BI. Full features:

Report Studio (Professional report authoring tool formatted for the web)

Query Studio (Ad hoc report authoring tool with instant data preview)

Analysis Studio (Explore multi-dimensional cube data to answer business questions)

Metric Studio (Monitor, analyze, and report on KPIs)

Metric Designer (Define, load, and maintain metrics to be available in Metric Studio)

Event Studio (Action based agents to notify decision makers as events happen)

Framework Manager (Semantic metadata layer tool which creates models or packages)

PowerPlay Studio (formerly PowerPlay Web)

IBM Cognos 8 BI has won numerous awards including the eWEEK Excellence Award in Analytics and Reporting, the LOTUS ADVISOR "Editor's Choice" Award, and TechTarget's SearchCRM.com 2005 Product of the Year.

In 2007, Cognos was named one of Canada's Top 100 Employers, as published in Maclean's magazine, one of only a handful of software development companies to receive this honour.[13]

Prior to being acquired, Cognos had been named to the InformationWeek 500, chosen as one of START-IT Magazine's "Hottest Companies of 2006" and won "Best of Information On Demand Showcase" as part of the IBM Information Management Awards.

Cognos, now as IBM Cognos Software, continues to rank in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence.