Companies Are Using Cognos' New Reporting Tool

It won't be formally announced until October, but Cognos Inc. is already selling its new ReportNet Web-based reporting tool, CEO Ron Zambonini disclosed Thursday during the company's first quarter earnings call.

ReportNet is built to handle business-intelligence reporting, production reporting, ad hoc queries, and managed reporting tasks, according to Zambonini. "The product has been built for massive scalability for [deployment to] hundreds of thousands of users," he said. The product will be targeted for enterprise reporting, reseller, and Web-billing and customer-communications markets.

The software is based on what Zambonini described as a new Web architecture that will be incorporated into Cognos Series 8, the next generation of the company's analytical software. The product's formal debut isn't scheduled until a Cognos analyst and user briefing day Oct. 1. But it's already being used by a German automaker for enterprise reporting, a Wall Street financial-services firm for customer billing and communications, and by several major Japanese companies, Zambonini said. He declined to provide other details about the software.

Cognos' current Impromptu reporting software, originally developed using client/server technology, is generally seen as lagging other reporting tools, says Eric Rogge, business-intelligence research director at Ventana Research. But being a few steps behind isn't necessarily a bad thing. "They've taken the opportunity to learn from all the other [competing] products," says Rogge, who has seen ReportNet. One of the product's advanced features is the ability to deliver reports in multiple languages simultaneously, he says.