05/06/2008

Cognos, an IBM company and specialist in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that MDS Pharma Services has selected IBM Cognos Now! to track and analyze sales performance across its lines of business.

ebizQ received the following:

MDS Pharma Services, a leading provider of innovative drug discovery and development solutions for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide, sought a business intelligence (BI) offering that could tap into its existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enabling stronger customer alignment, a better understanding of its customer and opportunity pipeline, and improved decision making capability.

MDS Pharma Services chose IBM Cognos Now!, the industry’s first BI solution with a continuous business monitoring appliance designed to help decision makers proactively track, monitor, and respond to continuously updated operational metrics in real-time or near real-time.

“IBM Cognos Now! delivers a BI solution that will significantly enhance our ability to support our clients,” said David Spaight, President, MDS Pharma Services. “The automated system will allow our Business Development team to respond to clients more rapidly with deliverables such as quotes and proposals. The multi-dimensional views of our data will give us better insight into client trends and enable us to better anticipate their needs.”

Using IBM Cognos Now!, MDS Pharma Services expects to be able to generate greater detail and more sophisticated, up-to-date analysis of their CRM data. Additionally, MDS Pharma Services will use IBM Cognos Now! to quickly access and analyze financial data from its Oracle E-Business Suite application.

IBM Cognos Now! empowers business users through highly visual, interactive and self-service dashboards, analysis and reports to deliver greater insight and faster, better-informed decision making. IBM Cognos Now! is a BI solution focused on delivering continuous business monitoring, prepackaged as an appliance. With IBM Cognos Now!, both enterprise and small-to-midsized companies can easily integrate multiple data sources to deploy and maintain a low-cost BI solution that monitors key business operations metrics. All the software is preconfigured and can be quickly plugged into an organization's existing infrastructure.

“Operational dashboards that monitor critical business operations are being implemented more frequently by organizations to track, monitor, and respond to continuously updated operational metrics in real time,” said Leah MacMillan, Vice-President, Product Marketing, Cognos. “Delivered as an appliance, IBM Cognos Now! is fast and easy to deploy, and is the perfect solution for companies that want to get started quickly with an operational BI project. Capitalizing on Cognos, MDS Pharma Services will now be able to respond quickly to changing metrics, gain a holistic view into sales performance, and ultimately drive better decision making in the organization.”