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Cognos

Cognos – IBM Business Intelligence Performance Management Application.

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Cognos is an IBM business intelligence performance management application that enables technical and non-technical staff in any firm to analyze, extract, and generate interactive dashboards that help the company make important choices. The Cognos tool combines a number of products to allow for contact with a variety of third parties. SAPs, relational databases, and other systems are examples. Cognos is a business intelligence-gathering platform that offers a scalable and self-service analytical solution for company purposes. Because of its highly dynamic nature, it’s an excellent tool for building user-friendly dashboards and reports for any business.

About The Company

Cognos began as a consultancy firm in 1969, founded by Alan Rushforth and Peter Glenister, and eventually expanded into software sales. Cognos was acquired by IBM on January 31, 2008, and the software suite’s history was preserved. It originated as a consultancy firm for the Canadian government, and its first software product, QUIZ, was released in 1979. Cognos switched its concentration from consulting to software sales during the Canadian recession of the 1980s. In 1982, it changed its name to Cognos from Quasar Systems Limited. The word “cognos” is derived from the Latin word “cognosco,” which means “knowledge gained by personal experience.”

It’s a sophisticated business intelligence tool that can be used for data mining, data analysis, event monitoring, and metric visualization. It provides a powerful analytics medium for any firm to foresee market trends and take relevant steps ahead of time, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition. It’s a business intelligence application that lets you create interactive dashboards so you can make better business decisions by anticipating market developments. Almost every organization now employs Cognos for their analytical work, as making vital business decisions at the appropriate time is critical to surviving in today’s competitive market.

Cognos
Image source: newintelligence.ca

Cognos has made working for businesses and organizations a lot easier, and here are some of the ways it does so.

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are used to fuel it, allowing it to generate future predictions and develop intelligent dashboards.
  • It employs pattern detection to uncover hidden patterns in data that would otherwise go unnoticed or unanticipated in regular situations.
  • Cognos’ ability to produce interactive dashboards in a variety of forms to meet corporate demands is one of its primary advantages. It allows stakeholders to study the charts in the way that they choose and aids in decision-making.
  • Natural language processing is a technique for extracting data from unstructured text and making intelligent predictions. Cognos uses AI that is powered by natural language to let people get intelligent answers to their questions.

Growth

With an estimated 8% wallet share in the BI and analytics software industry, it is one of the top three players. IBM Cognos Analytics continues to grow at a rapid pace, setting new standards for its competitors. Fortune 100 corporations prefer IBM Cognos, and it is used by some of the world’s most powerful organizations.

IBM Cognos has approximately 31400 clients in all major US regions, and BARC has dubbed it a market leader in integrated planning and analytics portfolios.

IBM Cognos provides significant capabilities for a variety of BI applications, including web-based OLAP analysis, structured reporting, ad-hoc reporting, and dashboards. IBM Cognos manages everything from data modeling and integration to exploration and visualization as an all-in-one platform. It’s an excellent solution for managing massive data volumes and supporting the needs of multiple users at the same time.

Rob Ashe- Ceo

Bridge Growth Partners’ Rob Ashe is an Executive Partner. He was the company’s previous President and Chief Executive Officer after joining in 1984. He was named President in 2002 and CEO in 2004, and he held both positions until IBM bought the company for $4.9 billion in 2007. After the acquisition, he worked at IBM as the General Manager of Business Analytics until 2012.

Mr. Ashe held many top executive positions at Cognos before becoming President and Chief Executive Officer, including Senior Vice President (“SVP”) of Application Development Tools, SVP of Products, SVP of Worldwide Customer Services, and Chief Corporate Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. He has served on Bridge Growth Partners LLC’s Technology Advisory Board. He has a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Ottawa. Rob is a business visionary, a successful corporate leader, a community-minded influencer, and a proponent of higher education’s value and growth.

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy – A Powerful Business Intelligence And Data Analytics Company.

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MicroStrategy is one of the leading providers of enterprise software globally. The company was founded in 1989 in Wilmington, Delaware. The founders of the company are Michael J. Saylor, Thomas Spahr, and Sanju Bansal. It is a publicly-traded company listed on New York Stock Exchange. MicroStrategy’s main focus is on developing software and that analyzes both internal and external data and helps businesses make better decisions. The company’s headquarters is based in Virginia and it has nearly 3,200 employees.

About MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has become a very dominating company in the business analytics sector as it has successfully built a simple UI design combined with high system performance and a universal approach. MicroStrategy has 4,000 customers spread across 26 countries for whom it provides a consistent and high-quality analytics platform. The major competitors of MicroStrategy in the market are IBM Cognos, Oracle’s BI Platform, and SAP AG Business Objects. The main goal of the company is to make sure that an enterprise has access to all its data and the platform functions optimally for the user end.

History Of The Company

Michael Saylor with a consulting contract from DuPont started MicroStrategy in 1989. He received $250,000 as start-up capital and office space in Delaware to start his work. Saylor went to MIT and while he was in college he met Sanju Bansal who joined the company shortly as a co-founder. While they were in college, both of them took a class in systems dynamics theory. Based on the idea of that subject MicroStrategy developed data mining and business intelligence software using nonlinear mathematics. After three years, the company landed its first major client, McDonald’s, and signed a contract of $10 million.

Between 1990 and 1996 the company was able to increase revenue by 100% each year. With the rapid growth, the company decided to move from Delaware to Virginia with its 50 employees. In June 1998 it applied for an IPO and became a public company. MicroStrategy eventually started focusing on its research and development division hence founded Alarm.com as part of its R&D unit.

MicroStrategy
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Economic Downfall And Lawsuit

In 2000, the company decided to restate its financial years for the preceding two years after doing a review of its accounting. When the company became a public entity its stock price rose from $7 per share to $333 per share within a year. But it started falling ($120 per share) and it was due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. The same year, MicroStrategy went through another turmoil as the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company and its executives. The charges were mostly of fraud and the matter was settled later in December where each of those officials paid $350,000 in fines.

Recent Days Of MicroStrategy

In 2009, the company decided to sell Alarm.com for $27.7 million. The deal was finalized with a venture capital firm ABS Capital Partners. The same year the company introduced OLAP services and eventually started developing business intelligence software applications for iPhone and iPad. In the last decade, the company also expanded the range of its services as it launched a cloud-based service, MicroStrategy Cloud in 2011. In 2014, the company collaborated with Facebook and introduced a new feature on its platform called PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine).

The company was going through a rough financial state in 2014 and decided to lay off 770 employees. Saylor also requested the company to reduce his salary to $1 from $875,000. In 2015, the company launched MicroStrategy 10 and after three years released the next version. Last year, the company released MicroStrategy 2020 which included a new design for its Hyperintelligence analytics tool.

Michael J. Saylor – Co-Founder And CEO

Michael J. Saylor is a famous American entrepreneur who is famous for co-founding MicroStrategy. He is also an author and the sole trustee of Saylor Academy. He went to MIT with a scholarship. He also joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity where he met Sanju Bansal. In 1999 he was featured in MIT Technology Review as an “Innovator Under 35.”