"Cognos Makes Peace With Excel"
That's the headline to Steve Swoyer's analysis on Cognos' latest product announcement.
But, spreadsheets are the next step up from manual pen-and-paper. They're soooo 1980s. What's the automated BI tool vendor thinking?
Last week, Steve writes, Cognos announced a new "Excel-friendly" spin on BI and PM—Cognos 8 (C8) BI Analysis for Excel, which it expects to ship sometime later this year. As Ventana Research principal Robert Kugler puts it, it's a "better-than-spreadsheet spreadsheet."
Okay, Cognos, convince us. You've been telling us for years that the conventional spreadsheet is stone-age stuff.
Delbert Krause, director of performance management product marketing with Cognos, admits that many business analysts, especially the financial folks, just love their spreadsheets.
Hmmm. My wife is a financial manager for a local government, and she still uses spreadsheets every day. Okay, it looks like BI vendors, despite their best efforts, haven't loosened our grip on the venerable spreadsheet.
Krause reports that Cognos is trying to help users users "analyze information in a way they’re comfortable with. [So they can] grab data from different sources, add data to a report that they want to do further analysis on that doesn’t exist in the report, either structured or unstructured data."
Cognos says its better-than-a-spreadsheet spreadsheet is a controlled, repeatable, and dynamically refreshable spreadsheet alternative -- rather than having wildly proliferating spreadsheets running rampant across the organization.
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