☰

Empresas y finanzas

FAST and Cognos Team to Deliver Enterprise Business Intelligence Through Search


    Companies Leverage the Power of Enterprise Search to Truly Deliver
    Business Intelligence for the Masses

    Fast Search & Transfer(TM) (FAST(TM)), the leading developer of
    enterprise search technologies and solutions, today announced a
    partnership with Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in
    business intelligence and performance management solutions. The
    partnership is the foundation for a new FAST integration that joins
    the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP(TM)) with Cognos 8
    Business Intelligence, bringing the power of business intelligence to
    every employee in an organization.
    More than a simple integration, the combination of FAST ESP and
    Cognos 8 BI with Cognos Go! Search Service delivers a solution which
    enables users to leverage sophisticated enterprise search
    functionality to quickly and easily find reports, analysis,
    scorecards, dashboards, and other business intelligence information,
    along with corporate content such as documents, e-mail and other forms
    of structured and unstructured business information distributed across
    the enterprise. Leveraging the power of Contextual Insight(TM), FAST
    ESP is able to analyze and interpret the underlying meaning behind
    reports, not just the reports themselves, providing users with a
    single search across all of their information, including their
    business intelligence information.
    The extension of enterprise search functionality to business
    intelligence content represents the next logical step in information
    access, consumption and utilization. FAST provides users with the
    ability to contextually reference once detached documents or
    information with data that has, until now, been restricted to a BI
    environment. With the integration of FAST ESP and Cognos 8 BI content,
    everyone inside an organization, whether they are sophisticated BI
    users or BI novices, can get immediate answers to their pressing
    business questions, and see links to the most relevant BI information,
    in a fast, intuitive and secure manner. The result is unprecedented
    insight into business performance.
    "The union of BI and enterprise search is a major innovation for
    both industries," said Patrick O'Leary, vice president of strategic
    alliances, Cognos. "By enabling a variety of sophisticated enterprise
    search techniques, FAST provides knowledge workers access to
    unstructured information such as documents, images, audio, video, and
    e-mails, in addition to the consistent and trusted BI information from
    Cognos 8 BI. Cognos recognizes the growing importance of enterprise
    search, and FAST has established a leadership position in a market
    that has nothing but upside. This is a significant step forward for
    BI, one that we hope will deliver a new range of functions for a new
    universe of BI users."
    "Popular ecommerce and community Web sites are changing the user
    expectations for software to support access to any and all
    information, interactivity, collaboration, and workflow," said Dan
    Vesset, research director of business analytics at IDC. "Combining BI
    and enterprise search tools has the potential to not only improve and
    broaden access to information, but also to employ new analytic
    techniques on both structured and unstructured data in support of
    decision making processes."
    "Utilizing the power of FAST ESP to interface with Cognos 8 BI
    information, users can obtain all the benefits of enterprise search in
    the world of BI. FAST ESP allows enterprise users to have simple,
    secure and fast one-click access to meaningful, relevant and
    consistent data to help improve productivity and the quality of
    decision making," said Ali I. Riaz, president of FAST. "By providing
    users with a single point of access to 100 percent of the information
    that is pertinent to their role within the company, FAST and Cognos
    are delivering on the promise of the search-driven enterprise."
    A combined solution from Cognos and FAST will enable businesses to
    gain four key benefits:

    -- Easier access to BI for a broad range of users throughout the
    organization

    Today's business user has become accustomed to using search
    technology on the Web, corporate intranet sites, and even within their
    applications. The widespread adoption of search technology is changing
    the dynamic for accessing and utilizing information. Harnessing the
    analytical capabilities of Cognos 8 BI within FAST ESP opens
    performance information to a broader array of users.

    -- Secure access to a broader set of business content

    Exposing Cognos 8 BI content through Cognos Go! and FAST ESP
    allows all enterprise users the easiest access to the content they
    need to excel in their role, based on existing user authentication
    protocols. Together, FAST and Cognos are improving business agility by
    delivering precise answers so everyone in the organization can find
    decision-critical content quickly and with fewer clicks.

    -- Faster, easier and more informed decision-making

    Taking advantage of an intuitive enterprise search interface,
    users can access the detailed information they need to make faster
    more informed decisions. This solution is giving companies a single
    point of access to all pertinent enterprise information in real time,
    regardless of data format, structure or location.

    -- Increased value of both enterprise search and BI investments

    Increase productivity by providing workers with custom views of
    content based on role, access and profile, so less time and effort are
    spent searching and more time is spent on analysis. This solution
    provides a greater return on assets by aggregating information from
    all internal and external sources and BI to create an intelligence
    portal to maximize an organization's assets.
    To support the continued engineering and sales activity, Cognos
    and FAST have joined each other's Alliance Partner programs. Both
    Cognos and FAST have built reputations within their respective
    industry segments for delivering innovative solutions to the world's
    most sophisticated enterprise customers. Similarities in product
    philosophy, customer bases, and partners are expected to help to drive
    a synergistic relationship for both organizations moving forward.

    About Cognos:

    Cognos, the 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? - 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. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at
    http://www.cognos.com.

    About FAST

    FAST is the leading developer of enterprise search technologies
    and solutions that are behind the scenes at the world's best known
    companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST's flexible and
    scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP) elevates the search
    capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the
    relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives
    revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging
    IT infrastructure. FAST's solutions are used by more than 2,600 global
    customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal
    Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Computer
    Associates, Dell, EMC Documentum, Factiva, Fidelity Investments,
    Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Merrill Lynch, Rakuten, Reed
    Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas
    Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia),
    Vodafone, and Wanadoo.
    FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the
    ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group
    operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia
    Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East and Africa. For
    further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

    (C) 2006 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer,
    FAST, FAST ESP, Contextual Insight and the FAST logo are trademarks of
    Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved. Cognos and the Cognos
    logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in
    the United States and/or other countries. All other names are
    trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

    Note to Editors:

    Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product
    information are available on the Cognos Web site at
    http://www.cognos.com, and at PR Newswire's site at
    http://www.prnewswire.com.