Cognos 8 Platform
Complete business view based on a modern SOA

The Cognos 8 platform is the common foundation for data access, system management, and information delivery that underpins Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and other Cognos performance management products. The Cognos 8 platform provides:

• Complete, consistent access to information the business can understand, own, and trust.
• Broad system management for IT to deploy, manage, and scale with confidence to meet service commitments.
• Modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) to leverage your infrastructure, adapt to change, and embrace open standards for long-term use and growth.

Complete, consistent access to information for the business

• Open data access. A single query engine and choice of sourcing strategies provides complete access to all of your data sources.
• Consistent information. Deliver a "model once/deploy anywhere" common business view, available in any language. Publish and secure corporate information so users only access information pertinent to them but share the common view.
• Data quality. Deliver data the business trusts by systematically applying data quality business rules as you identify, quantify, and resolve any issues.
• Optimized modeling. Teams of modelers can use built-in proven practices to build optimal, multi-tier models. IT can insulate business users from grappling with modeling complexity while managing changes in the system or demand.

Broad system management for IT to deploy, manage, and scale

• Enterprise-scale. Broadly deploy software without requiring end-user downloads. Benefit from built-in fault tolerance, a predictable and linear response, and comprehensive security.
• Complete view of system activity. Administrators gain a complete view of system activity and access to hundreds of system metrics and thresholds. Improve performance by taking action before problems affect your end users.
• Streamline environment changes. Upgrade Manager lets you test, compare, and summarize report results between two application environments (e.g., new and older versions of Cognos 8 BI).

Modern service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• Leverage standards today & forward. The Cognos 8 platform is built on a modern service-oriented architecture, based on open standards, and is completely environment neutral.
• Flexible infrastructure. The Cognos 8 platform can scale up or out as needed with peer-to-peer services connected from anywhere on the network.
• Embed and extend BI in your applications. Customers, partners, and Cognos consultants can innovate and customize your performance management applications due to the SOA-based Cognos 8 platform and its purpose-built services. The single, open API gives you full access to functionality so you can embed performance management capabilities into other applications.