IBM's Cognos buy yields 10 business intelligence products

Fresh from acquiring business intelligence vendor Cognos, IBM Wednesday detailed its strategy for automating the capture and analysis of business information, and unveiled 10 new or enhanced products for specific industries such as banking, retail, government and life sciences.

IBM completed the $5 billion purchase of Cognos only last week, but says its 15-year partnership with the vendor is allowing for quick rollout of new capabilities. Despite having a strong relationship with Cognos already, IBM officials say rapid increases in the amount of business data and expectations for high performance necessitated the merging of IBM's computational and analytical capabilities with the visualization tools made by Cognos. (More information on IBM's announcements can be found here.) 

"Any time you invest $5 billion to acquire a business, there must be some important reasons why," Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM'S software business, said during a press conference in New York City.

Rob Ashe, the former CEO of Cognos, is now heading up a 35,000-person team at IBM focused on business intelligence and performance management, which Ashe defines as the measuring and monitoring of finances, expenses, revenue and assets. In the enterprise, these capabilities have moved from small departmental rollouts to organization-wide activities that help sales, marketing, operations, IT and all other departments work together and make coordinated decisions based on uniform data, he said.

For industries that face strict government regulations, IBM on Wednesday rolled out Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control, a combination of software, hardware and services that helps businesses "securely manage unstructured information in a legal manner regardless of its current form or location, and to classify and analyze the content."

The product includes a so-called "information vault" for storing information that could potentially be evidence in court, along with tools that identify, classify and aggregate content and process information from multiple sources. Enterprises face a sea of uncontrolled content, and manual, paper-based processes, but lawyers want actionable information in digital form, organized with tools like dashboards, said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM's information management software.

Tagging information to make it easier to find in legal discovery scenarios is one of the keys to the new product, he said.

IBM also used the technology it acquired from Cognos to build industry-specific tools such as risk insight and risk-adjusted profitability analysis for banking, health analytics, life sciences promotional analysis, retail store operations and planning, crime management and insight, municipal performance management, manufacturing sales and operations planning, financial planning and workforce analytics.

The Life Sciences tool lets pharmaceutical companies meet regulations on promotional spending and use information on customers, promotional spending, drug sales and clinical information to improve decision-making and planning.