Cognos released its new Cognos 8 BI v3 solution last week, and the Ottawa-based BI vendor is taking a targeted partner approach as part of its partner recruitment strategy to bring the new offering to a wider market.
The solution is designed for the mid-market and large enterprises, and offers users enhanced BI capabilities and features to enable access to pertinent business information.
This release marks the third major release of Cognos’ flagship product and Rich Luciano, senior director of partner development and recruitment at Cognos, says his goal for Canada is to find more partners to add to the Cognos partner program.
“Our partner strategy for North America and Canada is to maintain solid relationships with our current partners,” Luciano said. “But at the same time, we need to make sure we can identify which geographies, technologies and/or industries we want to add partners in.”
Luciano says Cognos currently has almost 200 active partners in Canada and around 900 in the U.S. He goes on to say that this targeted partner strategy is a goal for Cognos moving forward with Cognos, adding he believes Cognos does not have enough partners and wants to build its base.
Cognos 8 BI v3 features an abundance of new capabilities and enhancements that include an express authoring mode, transformer capabilities, scorecard portlets, briefing books and self-service personal alerts.
With the new release, Luciano says he has already started hearing great feedback from partners.
“Partners are telling me that customers are getting faster implementation because we’ve added in new capabilities,” Luciano says. “What partners tell me they like is that they can now get deeper more quickly into the Cognos product.”
Michael Langton, CEO of Toronto-based Newcomp Solutions, a CPM solution provider and also long-time Cognos partner, says although Cognos 8 BI v3 was just released last week, customers are already showing an interest in it.
“The message of having an integrated best in class solution and platform is really resonating more with customers today than it was with previous releases,” Langton said.
Concerning IBM’s acquisition of Cognos, Langton says he thinks it will bring nothing but positive things to Cognos partners and their customers.
“We see this as a great thing because there’s no overlapping or conflicting interests with IBM and Cognos,” Langton said. “It will be a way for Cognos to have a louder voice in the market place and I definitely don’t see any doors being closed in the future if and when this acquisition becomes official.”
On the Cognos end, Luciano’s message is much of the same and he says he thinks partners will see the best of both worlds.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen but as knowledge is available to come out, it will come out,” Luciano said. “At Cognos, we’re all about expedited knowledge transfer. We have a real commitment to our partners and we try to touch them as much as we can.”
