Now Available: IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay

By Mark Morton, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Cognos, An IBM Company

With IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay, you can maintain the IBM Cognos PowerPlay 7 user interface and features that are familiar to your user communities (like graphical analysis, drill-through, scenario dimensions, projections, and subsets) and smoothly migrate to the IBM Cognos 8 platform. 

Customers who have adopted the IBM Cognos 8 platform, can then use other Cognos 8 BI capabilities (reporting, dashboarding, scorecarding etc) to obtain added value from their investment in PowerCubes. This opens opportunities for you to provide capabilities to more users in the client environment, as well as further capabilities to existing users.

Access all of the resources you will need to plan and execute your migration to IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay.

What is IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay?

Both PowerPlay Web and the PowerPlay client functionality are now available as well as migration tools to help automate the process of moving from IBM Cognos Series 7 to IBM Cognos 8 BI.

Figure 1: IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay includes PowerPlay Web functionality (now called PowerPlay Studio)

User communities will be able to continue using the applications and interfaces that they know today but overall costs of ownership and management will be lower than ever. In addition, it will be possible to take advantage of the many benefits of the IBM Cognos 8 Platform.

Figure 2 and 3: IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay provides both Series 7 PowerPlay Client modes – Explorer and Reporter

The benefits of the IBM Cognos 8 platform

The IBM Cognos 8 platform means broader BI capabilities and a lower cost to deploy, manage, and maintain the BI environment.

Better reporting from existing PowerCubes-Formatting, Scheduling and Bursting

With IBM Cognos 8 BI, customers can create highly formatted reports that are based on existing PowerCubes and run these automatically during off-hours so that they are delivered directly to selected groups of users based on security permissions and/or cube dimensions.

The IBM Cognos 8 platform makes it easier to publish content, backup and restore information, and ensure that employees from all over an organization can get the information they need in the way that works best for them. A more informed organization performs better, which lowers the cost of administration and maintenance, and creates more satisfied users and management.

Better Administration and Management of PowerCubes-Zero footprint, designed to scale

IBM Cognos PowerPlay administrators or IT professionals, can use the single, zero footprint administration console in IBM Cognos 8 BI with familiar controls to administer all BI capabilities, including those in IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay. Functions like load-balancing, failover, performance tuning, and monitoring can all be administered through a Web browser. Adding new servers to the environment is much easier than it was in Series 7. Now you just tell the new server the location of the content store and it will "self register" – you no longer need to tell all servers about the new one and you can leave the system running while you add new servers.

IBM Cognos 8 BI delivers broad system management functionality that can handle the demands of a large-scale enterprise with ever-increasing data and the need to scale to thousands of users. IBM Cognos 8 BI meets or exceeds service commitments with proactive administration and task oriented system monitoring which gives a consolidated view of all system activity; from scheduled and interactive reports, to servers and dispatchers. You can deploy the solution across the enterprise with full fault tolerance and security. You can also identify and correct anomalies through detailed system metrics, and with the ability to set thresholds that can be monitored. In addition, you can streamline the implementation of upgrades and environment changes with Upgrade Manager, making it easier and more efficient to respond quickly to the new solution requirements.

This functionality in IBM Cognos 8 BI delivers a lower the cost of administration and maintenance as well increasing the convenience for all users. In addition, all the same capabilities that IBM Cognos PowerPlay administrators require are still available.

Maintaining existing PowerCube investments

IBM Cognos 8 BI Transformer’s tools can create and manage existing cubes optimized for exploration and analysis. In IBM Cognos 8 BI Transformer, you can build and publish data cubes from existing queries for sub-second response times and additional OLAP exploration. You can create hierarchies, define relationships, and publish cubes with a few mouse clicks. Content is now stored in the Cognos 8 Content Store, and can be published as a data source. You can also leverage these existing cube investments and enable targeted analysis to speed decision making. All aspects of IBM Cognos 8 BI security are now supported allowing for multiple simultaneous security environments (e.g. LDAP, Active Directory) as well as Cognos namespaces.

Figure 4: Transformer is a part of IBM Cognos 8 BI

IBM Cognos 8 BI Transformer provides a flexible design environment, access to advanced multidimensional modeling functionality, superior manageability to design and build cubes efficiently, on any platform, from any data source.

Improved Drill-Through

In Series 7, it is necessary to define drill-through target reports in Transformer when PowerCubes are created. With IBM Cognos 8, you can continue to do that (for compatibility with existing Transformer models) however, it is also possible to define (or add more) drill-through targets (based on packages or reports) after the cube has been created through the (zero footprint) administration interface.

Software Services

Cognos Professional Services’ assessment and implementation services help ensure successful IBM Cognos PowerPlay migrations. Our expert consultants work with customers to assess their environment and improve current administration process and the end user experience.

The Migration Assessment Services includes an audit of security content, assignment (Access Manager and Upfront), automation and portal metadata. Leveraging these services are particularly beneficial for customers who have third-party OLAP sources; pure client and offline user communities; and/or IBM Cognos Series 7 applications in addition to IBM Cognos Series 7 PowerPlay.

Cognos Education currently offers two instructor-led courses for IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay: Migrating from Series 7 PowerPlay; and What’s New (version 8.4). Topics include the numerous changes on the administration for the Cognos 8 platform, the Administration Console, cube management, drill-through, load balancing, security and data sources, and the new migration assistant.

Summary With IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay, clients can maintain the IBM Cognos PowerPlay Series 7 user interface that is familiar to them and smoothly migrate it into the IBM Cognos 8 platform. Access technical documents, on demand web seminars, proven practices and more