Cognos acquires dashboard specialist Celequest

Business-intelligence software vendor Cognos has purchased privately held Celequest, a business-intelligence company with expertise in real-time operational dashboards, as a way to attract more midmarket and departmental customers.

Cognos confirmed the move Wednesday after closing the acquisition of Celequest on Tuesday. The company didn't disclose the deal's financial details.

Like its business-intelligence pure-play rivals MicroStrategy and Business Objects, Cognos wants to find ways to make its software easier to use and accessible to more of an organization's staff. Dashboards represent a quick visual way for people to view the results of queries of their corporate data and thus form a basis for assessing both individual and overall performance.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Business-intelligence software vendor Cognos has purchased privately held Celequest, a business-intelligence company with expertise in real-time operational dashboards, as a way to attract more midmarket and departmental customers.

Cognos confirmed the move Wednesday after closing the acquisition of Celequest on Tuesday. The company didn't disclose the deal's financial details.

Like its business-intelligence pure-play rivals MicroStrategy and Business Objects, Cognos wants to find ways to make its software easier to use and accessible to more of an organization's staff. Dashboards represent a quick visual way for people to view the results of queries of their corporate data and thus form a basis for assessing both individual and overall performance.

Available via a dedicated hardware appliance or as a hosted service, Celequest's Lava dashboards are particularly useful to those who need to constantly monitor their performance against a set of metrics. Accessing real-time data, the users are also able to use the dashboards to flag performance issues, drill down to the likely causes and implement measures to resolve the problems. Celequest also aims to make it simple for individuals to create and customize their own real-time dashboards. The company's Lava offerings include data-integration, analytics and collaboration tools as well as the dashboards.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.