IBM announced a redesigned user experience of its flagship business intelligence solution, Cognos Analytics, based on the same self-service design principles as Watson Analytics.

IBM Cognos Analytics provides a security-rich, scalable enterprise solution to access, analyze and share critical business performance information across workgroups. It can scale to tens to thousands of users, is 100 percent web-based, and can be deployed on premises and on the Cloud.

With the redesign of Cognos Analytics, business users and IT professionals are now able to author and distribute reports, and access self-service dashboards about things that matter to their business, like monthly financial reports, weekly sales pipeline trends, daily production yields, hourly inventory levels – and do so on any device anywhere.

IBM Cognos Analytics delivers a combination of self-service and managed data analytics capabilities. New features include:

• Intent-driven modeling environment: With new intent-driven modeling capabilities, novice users can easily pull together the data they need without having to understand the technical details of the data sources. For example, by simply typing the words “revenue,” “product” and “department,” Cognos Analytics can interpret the user’s intent, search the data sources for those attributes and then propose the model to use.
• Smarter search that works in-context: Smarter search is enabled throughout the solution to help users quickly and easily find relevant content and accelerate the completion of tasks. In authoring mode, for example, a user can type “chart” and smart search instantly points to the right menu to add it. The user can even be guided to the most appropriate visualization for that data. As a result, line-of-business users can quickly and easily create their own reports and dashboards without help from IT – while power users still have access to all the detailed capabilities they need.
• A single environment for all types of business reporting: Cognos Analytics provides the full spectrum of enterprise and departmental reporting in one solution – from production managed reports to self-service authored reports and dashboards. This single environment provides the same experience in the office, on the road and on any device, to help satisfy the business demand for insight while helping to reduce IT backlogs. It can also help to ensure everyone is working from the same data, and can easy communicate and collaborate across teams and share information and findings instantly.

With self-service design principles in common, Watson Analytics opens the door to agile and empowered user discovery, analysis predictions and compelling visualization which now pairs with the new Cognos Analytics as the indispensable trusted and scalable source of enterprise BI.

Mueller, Inc. manufactures and distributes pre-engineered metal building and residential metal roofing products in the southwestern and central United States. Mueller is using Watson Analytics to help easily gain deeper business insight from their structured and unstructured data that’s spread across the business. Business leaders at Mueller can get insight from their data by simply asking questions using natural language. Then Mueller will use IBM Cognos Analytics as its single, unified BI platform to help improve its business performance and operations.

“Watson Analytics is an individual data discovery tool that makes it easy to uncover insights from data,” said Mark Lack at Mueller. “With Cognos Analytics, we’ll able to put that insight into practice by distributing reports and providing dashboards with this trusted information to get everyone on the same page.”

“IBM helps enterprises across all industries extract new insights from the explosion of available data to drive competitive advantage,” said Beth Smith, GM, IBM Analytics Platform. “With a Cognos Analytics, we have reimagined BI, delivering a modern user experience for business users, helping them gain the self-service independence they want without compromising the trusted scale an enterprise platform IT needs. Now our clients can gain the insights to effectively manage and improve the outcomes of their business.”

For more information on IBM Analytics, please visit www.ibm.com/analytics