Cognos, a leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, is previewing a new enterprise BI tool called Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel that enables Excel users to access centrally controlled and secured Cognos 8 BI performance information.

The self-service nature of the new capability should make it easy for business and financial analysts, or line-of-business managers, to interactively explore and analyze multidimensional information within Excel without draining valuable IT resources, the company said.

Using formula-based data access, business users will be able to find answers, solve business problems, and report key results in a convenient format while leveraging the Cognos 8 BI infrastructure for data consistency, freshness, and security, the company said. For richer analysis and formatting, or for broader enterprise distribution of reports, they can re-use the results of their exploration within other worksheets or Cognos 8 BI's reporting and analysis capabilities.

"The ability to conduct drag and drop exploration and analysis of controlled BI data within Excel will really benefit the business analyst who wants to solve analytical problems in a familiar spreadsheet environment," said Vivian Adashek, financial systems project specialist, Manpower. "These analysts are gaining direct access to the underlying data sources within Excel so they can flexibly analyze trusted secure information from Cognos 8 BI together with other data sources without requiring IT to do this for them. As always, Cognos is listening and partnering with its customers on new product innovations."

With Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel, business users will have access to the entire Cognos 8 BI data layer. This provides a connection to heterogeneous data sources, including planning and consolidation. They will also gain a managed view of data through a single interface to explore, select, filter and define the layout of the desired information. Flexible query capabilities let business users refresh and modify their original analysis, alter the layout, express information as formulas, and manage the query parameters. As the Cognos 8 BI data refreshes, or the query expands through drill-down, linked Excel calculations and charts are updated automatically.

"In IDC's Services and Software Leading Indicators survey, C-suite executives expressed their desire for improved integrated access to relevant information as well as real-time monitoring of business performance," said Kathleen Wilhide, Research Director, Financial Performance and Strategy Management, IDC. "Business analysts are faced with multiple daily requests for on-the-fly analysis. Through the use of Excel connected to the trusted Cognos performance management environment, analysts are empowered to produce self-service reports and analysis with familiar Excel, while maintaining the integrity of information through a live connection to the enterprise system of record."

Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel will extend Cognos' support for Microsoft Office from consumption of pre-authored content within Office to report authoring, exploration and analysis. It joins solutions already in place for Cognos Controller, Cognos Planning, and Cognos 8 BI. By reaching business users that may prefer to work in spreadsheets, it will enable organizations to standardize on a single, trusted BI platform for all its users. Standardization on Cognos lets IT fully leverage the single security framework and proven web services-based architecture of Cognos 8 BI, while business users across the enterprise benefit from a direct connection to the same trusted performance information whether they are working from a spreadsheet, mobile device or a browser-based capability.

"Cognos is committed to supporting the BI needs of all users across organizations, regardless of their preferred, or required, authoring environments. Business analysts that are power Excel users may prefer to manipulate data for reporting and analysis within Excel, but their current method of cutting and pasting or manually entering information is fraught with security risk and data latency issues. Like all users in the organization, they will benefit from access to centrally trusted and controlled performance information," said Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing, Cognos. "This solution will immediately extend the value of a customer's Cognos 8 BI deployment, and unlike other tools available, it is not limited to exploration of proprietary data sources and does not require IT expertise to enjoy its benefits."

Availability and Preview

Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel is targeted to be available in the second half of 2007. It will be initially previewed at Cognos Finance Forum 2007, which spans North America and Europe with additional venues in Latin America and Asia Pacific. For a full list of event venues, agendas, speaking abstracts, dates and registration information, visit: http://www.cognos.com/financeforums2007/index.html

About Cognos Business Intelligence Products

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. To further enable faster and more effective decisions, Cognos offers additional consumer modes that bring BI to the familiar working environments of every worker. Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel and the Cognos Go! Consumer modes seamlessly extend the complete and proven capabilities of Cognos 8 BI to more users across the enterprise. For further information about Cognos BI Products visit: http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/index.html

About Cognos

Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand, and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization's ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? û and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies. Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers.