Cognos 8 Platform

The IBM Cognos 8 platform is built with a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) to let you deploy your performance management solution efficiently and reliably and provides the agility to respond to dynamic business and technology requirements.

Built from the ground up

The Cognos 8 platform was built from the ground up on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture. This ensures that you can:

• Deploy Cognos performance management capabilities across large and complex infrastructures, even as data volumes grow and IT standards change.
• Meet the needs of your entire user base, from executives and analysts to front-line managers.
• Provide the capabilities your business needs now and those it will need years from now.

Single set of standards-based services

The Cognos 8 architecture was built from a single set of standards-based services (for example: presentation and query) that span all performance management capabilities.

Because the Cognos 8 platform is based on standards, you can leverage your investments in platforms, operating systems, hardware, security. A single set of services for the broad range of performance management capabilities - means fewer components to deploy and maintain. IT can efficiency deploy, maintain and change the system more efficiently without impacting your business users' experience. In addition, business users' ability to access data sources from a variety of platforms means they can get up and running faster, access more information and continue to work through backend changes.

Peer-to-Peer services

The Cognos 8 platform operates without a master service. Instead, all services are loosely coupled. This approach provides tremendous reliability because if one service fails other services are not impacted.

• Reliable performance: Cognos 8 platform services are self-aware and self-spawning to automatically adjust to increased load.
• Built-in redundancy: Requests to failed services are automatically re-routed to another service located elsewhere on the network.
• Leverage idle capacity: Re-route requests to services on different servers in different locations.

Purpose-built services and a single, open API

The Cognos 8 architecture is built on coarsely grained services that enable you to easily integrate other business functions. The purpose-built nature of the services means that additional innovations, such as mobile technologies, can leverage existing query and presentation services and other resources.

In addition, the Cognos 8 architecture features a single, open application program interface (API) founded on SOAP and XML to enable integrate with Microsoft Office, business performance management (BPM) solutions, enterprise search capabilities, and other applications.