Cognos, IBM, Google Expand BI In Enterprise

Cognos Inc. on Wednesday said it has partnered with IBM and Google to connect their enterprise search engines with its business intelligence software in order to expand its use among corporate workers.

The companies' software is being linked through the Cognos Go Search Service, software that makes it possible for company employees using IBM Websphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition and Google OneBox for Enterprise to search content within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

Despite the wealth of corporate information stored in business intelligence applications, about one in five corporate workers use the software, primarily because the user interface is geared more toward business analysts, Don Campbell, vice president of platform strategy and technologies at Cognos, said. The integration with IBM and Google search engines is expected to make it possible for more workers to retrieve reports, analyses, metric information, and events by letting them use a more familiar UI.

"We believe that the simplicity of the search experience and the search interface will drive toward business intelligence for the masses, and engage 100 percent of users within an organization," Campbell said.

Google announced Google OneBox Wednesday in releasing a new version of its enterprise search appliance. OneBox enables Google's familiar keyword search box to scour all content and business data, including transaction data, structured data stored in databases and unstructured data found in Web pages or documents on a file server.Through a joint development effort with Cognos, OneBox would deliver business intelligence content through three modules at the top of search results. The Report Module would display graphical charts, tables, and maps for an at-a-glance understanding of a business issue, the Metric Module would provide a visual representation of a key performance metric and its status, and a Search Module would present links to related business intelligence information.

IBM's technology would also provide a consolidated view of business intelligence data and related content across an organization. The search technology is based on the open source Unstructured Information Management Architecture framework, which was developed by IBM. UIMA is a platform for creating, integrating and deploying software for discovering unstructured data.

Cognos Go Search Service is scheduled to ship in May. Cognos is based in Canada with U.S. corporate headquarters in Burlington, Mass.