Cognos Express

Integrated BI and planning for midsize organizations

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IBM Cognos Express Features

With Cognos Express, you can equip everyone with the tools to help your organization outperform – including reports, analysis, dashboards, what-if analysis, plans, budgets and more.

Cognos Express is based on a set of integrated core capabilities that are shared across all modules:

A powerful in-memory analytics server to deliver fast responses to business questions
Flexible data access to relational, OLAP and local data sources in any combination
A common web portal that delivers a single shared view of the business
Tight security supporting single sign-on
A simple management console to control installation, configuration and operation

This shared foundation enables you to add new Cognos Express capabilities with “plug-and-play” ease. Choose any or all of the four modules according to your organization's needs.

IBM Cognos Express Reporter

IBM Cognos Express Reporter delivers complete, self-service reporting and ad hoc query capabilities for workgroups and midsize organizations.

IBM Cognos Express Reporter empowers business users to access, modify or create reports quickly and easily. It meets all of your reporting needs with a self-service design that helps reduce the cost and time needed to share information throughout an organization. Cognos Express Reporter includes the following features:

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Breadth of reporting capabilities, including financial, production, operational, transactional, managed or ad hoc reports
A complete, consistent view of information throughout a company to ensure users work with the same accurate data at all times
Support for mobile workers who want to discover opportunities and analyze trends, regardless of their location, situation or connectivity
An interactive analytics experience for users who need to browse and explore data offline using their PC or Apple iPad
Flexible reporting capabilities and access to all corporate data in any combination for comprehensive, accurate reports
Simple, intuitive, drag-and-drop authoring capabilities for self-service reporting by any user

IBM Cognos Express Advisor

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IBM Cognos Express Advisor empowers business analysts, business users and executives in workgroups and midsize companies to quickly analyze complex data and share insights through high-impact visualizations. With Cognos Express Advisor, it’s possible to go from raw data to analysis and a published dashboard in as little as 60 seconds.

Features include:

Ability to connect to any type of data source – including personal, corporate, business intelligence data and reports - for a dimensional view of your business
An intuitive, easy-to-use web interface that enables users to independently develop high-impact dashboards and analytic applications
Flexible graphic displays for quick analysis of key areas, such as customers, products and geographies
Customizable visualizations and charts for more meaningful presentations
Powerful dashboards that can be created quickly and shared instantly
Write-back capabilities to support immediate action and better outcomes.

IBM Cognos Express Xcelerator

IBM Cognos Express Xcelerator transforms common spreadsheets for real-time, Excel-based business analysis and optimization. It quickly delivers powerful multidimensional business analysis based on trusted information. Cognos Express Xcelerator can help you take advantage of existing Excel skills and investments while overcoming the risks and limitations of spreadsheet-only processes.

Features include:

Powerful “what-if” modeling for building and testing business scenarios
Write-back capabilities that enable users to update plans immediately and align the right resources to capitalize on new opportunities.
Centrally managed data, business hierarchies, rules and calculations to help eliminate data silos and inconsistencies throughout the organization

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IBM Cognos Express Planner

IBM Cognos Express Planner provides planning, budgeting and forecasting software for workgroups and midsize organizations. It helps businesses transform their planning processes so they can react quickly to changing business conditions. Cognos Express Planner replaces slow, cumbersome manual planning processes with automated daily, weekly or monthly planning tools using the latest, accurate data.

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Features include:

A flexible, structured planning process that is easy to deploy and use
Drag-and-drop planning model creation
A blend of managed workflow and personalized analysis for improved business agility
An easy-to-use, web-based interface that enables finance and non-finance users to contribute plan data and view current plans with no coding skills required
An in-memory analytics server for real-time processing with large numbers of contributors