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.
