Cognos's Quest for Real-Time BI

Cognos acquired privately held Celequest today in a move designed to beef up the company's performance management offering. Celequest specializes in real-time operational dashboards for sales force management, but also offers other BI solutions. The acquisition closed yesterday and financial terms were not disclosed. Customers typically use Celequest to monitor real-time feeds from transactional systems and Celequest is the industry's only dashboard solution to be offered as an on-premise application or via a SaaS model, according to Rob Rose, chief strategy officer at Cognos. Rose sees Celequest's appliance-based offering strengthening Cognos' channel opportunities, while Celequests' SaaS and appliance models will boost Cognos' midmarket and departmental offerings. Celequest's solutions will also extend Cognos' vision in creating operational, user-friendly BI tools and will be "immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 BI," Rose says. "Celequest's innovation in self-service dashboard creation and real-time information monitoring enhances our performance management solution. This gives us the opportunity to reach a new class of users who need to continuously monitor performance against key metrics and make decisions based on real-time, operational information." Celequest is also certified on AppExchange and can continuously monitor Salesforce.com data in a hosted environment, use process or user-triggered alerts to notify management of changes in metrics via the Salesforce.com user interface, and manage day-to-day activities relating to risk exposure, operational efficiency, and inventory control. This integration bodes well for Cognos, which maintains a strong partnership with Salesforce.com. As part of this tighter integration, Cognos announced availability of Cognos 8 BI on AppExchange yesterday. In addition, they also unveiled the Cognos Data Adapter for Salesforce.com, which will provide both Salesforce.com and Cognos 8 BI customers with direct access to Salesforce.com data, and the ability to capture Salesforce.com information over time and combine it with other Salesforce.com data. Mark Smith, executive vice president of research at Ventana Research, says many companies are using BI to drive performance improvements, which requires a BI system to provide end-users with easy-to-use information for visibility across operations. The acquisition of Celequest is representative of this, Smith adds. "The acquisition provides Cognos with a complementary BI solution that delivers on the operational intelligence derived from business events across an enterprise." Related articles: BI Battles Risky Business Big Blue BI For the Rest of Us?