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Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
Cognos has long-standing history of success in helping B2B companies consolidate, analyze and report on clickstream data, legacy data, ERP data, data housed in relational databases from call centers, manufacturing sites, financial departments and so on. The strength of the Cognos solution is that we are both source- and platform-agnostic, allowing organizations to bring all types of data together to have a single view of the truth.
Our ETL solution, Cognos DecisionStream, uses a visual design environment that can 'read' IT resources to determine where to get data, how to transform it, and where and how to store the resulting outputs. This is accomplished without significant code creation. Uniting different data sources regardless if you are working with your own internal data sources or working with multiple external data sources in addition to your own is a challenge. In the B2C world, you have more ownership over data structure and how data is captured -- this is not true in the B2B world typically. Standards such as XML, however, help with this. As companies begin to take advantage of these standards, it will be easier to integrate external systems and data.
That said, Cognos has delivered significant and ongoing customer value to B2B sites looking to unite and analyze massive volumes of data. In the case of one logistics company, the sheer volume and the disparate sources (and types) of data were a significant challenge. Cognos solutions were brought to bear against nearly ten terabytes of data housed in a number of databases. As you can imagine, a company whose businesses is about trucks and trucking doesn't have the luxury working solely with XML-based content: it is faxes, invoices, tracking paperwork, and late-payment notices, as well as delivery information via satellite from the trucks themselves, and communications offices all around the world. Given the vast information requirements of the 115-year-old company, Cutler Hammer chose Cognos DecisionStream. Cognos DecisionStream unites most of the company's data from disparate sources, such as legacy systems' text file extracts, Oracle and SQL Server databases, and provides a complete and consistent model of important business information. Dimensional data marts, which are information stores, organized and coordinated by business categories (i.e., customer, product, territory), can be generated and maintained with Cognos DecisionStream.
If you are interested in reading more about this, here is an article crafted by the team at Cutler Hammer.
For more information, check out this week's SearchCRM Vendor Selection Series, featuring Cognos.
This was first published in March 2002
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