Cognos Beta Participation — A Win-Win for Customers and Cognos

The Cognos Beta Program is designed to provide our Cognos customers and partners with an early look at our upcoming products, and to give them an opportunity to use these products in real-world applications. But it does more than that for both customers and Cognos.

 

"Cognos cares enough to inform me of upcoming products before their general release and ask my opinion. That's really important." Recent Beta Program Participant

 

The Cognos Beta Program not only gives our customers an advanced look at solutions before they are broadly available but also gives them specialized customer care including onsite assistance, expedited support and product management access. The Cognos Beta Program offers a very high-touch, customer service offering to ensure customer satisfaction.

 

"It is all about trust and keeping us 'in the loop.' That builds loyalty." Recent Beta Program Participant

 

The Cognos Beta Program is designed to ensure that customers feel highly engaged by Cognos. By giving you an insider's view into the Cognos R&D cycle, customers can receive a great degree of user loyalty from Cognos. But the offering goes further than simply sending product.

For example, the TLC Beta Program consists in sending a Cognos team (at Cognos' cost) to the customer site for a period of one to two weeks. This team is responsible for assisting the customer with the installation of the beta software and collaborating with the customer on the creation of a test application as well as a testing agenda, prior to the start of the beta.

 

Additional Perks

• Expedited support: During the onsite visit, the Cognos TLC team will report all issues and enhancement requests to Development headquarters in Ottawa. Resources from our Development headquarters will be committed to supporting the onsite Cognos TLC team. After the visit has been completed, Customer Support personnel will be assigned to work with the customer to resolve further issues and get bugs reproduced and fixed.
• Free training: The onsite Cognos TLC team provides hands-on knowledge transfer to customer resources.
• Closed-loop feedback: Participation in the program provides customers with the opportunity to have an early look at our upcoming products, moreover being offered a chance to impact subsequent revisions and find issues specific to their environment. This enables Cognos to ensure that the product will meet the customer's needs when released, which should have a direct impact on the success of our customers organizations.

TLC participants will go through a qualifying process to ensure their environment is up to conformance level for beta, that they can allocate time to plan the visit (test plan and test application) and that they have appropriate human and hardware resources to support a TLC visit at their site.

For more broad-based participation, we have the General Beta Program. This provides participants with remote support from the Beta Management Team and Customer Support for the duration of the beta period. Customers are granted access to the software via download and are expected to carry on with testing at their convenience.

The Beta Management Team will contact participants once or twice weekly to verify testing status. General participants will go through a qualifying process to ensure their environment is up to conformance level for beta, that they can allocate time to test the software and that they have appropriate hardware resources to support testing.

 

General Beta Program

TLC Beta Program

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