Cognos announced Cognos Now!, the first offering in a new family of BI and performance management solutions that will be offered exclusively as hardware appliances and through the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Cognos Now! is a solution that offers self-service dashboards, integrated data, analysis and reports as a prepackaged BI appliance or as a hosted service. Cognos Now! allows customers to easily deploy and maintain a complete, operational BI solution at a low cost, even when IT staff or resources are limited.

Based on technology from the recent Celequest acquisition, Cognos Now! Is the industry’s first BI appliance. The product is also offered as Cognos Now! for Salesforce for customers who need to monitor performance against their Salesforce data. With interactive, self-service operational dashboards and real-time information monitoring, Cognos Now! allows enterprise departments and small to mid-size companies to proactively track, monitor and respond to critical data immediately. With continuously up-to-date business visibility, customers can improve the management of day-to-day organizational activities and increase operational efficiency. Cognos Now! is particularly beneficial to small and mid-market companies that often lack the IT resources and budget to install, deploy and maintain software solutions.

Operational BI solutions deployed on Cognos Now! appliances are immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, delivering a complete view of enterprise information and further extending the value of the Cognos performance management framework.

Cognos Now! is a complete BI offering packaged in a single hardware appliance that can be installed in less than an hour. Cognos Now! includes the preconfigured hardware server, the BI application and all other necessary software for a fixed price regardless of the number of users, dashboards or data sources. The solution’s self-service dashboards enable business users across an organization to personalize and change views without any additional training or IT involvement. With a scalable architecture, Cognos Now! Can support vast numbers of users, data sources and dashboards on a single appliance requiring minimal maintenance.

Cognos Now! is available immediately as a hardware appliance or hosted service. There are three appliance editions - SMB, Standard, and Enterprise — with different processor and memory configurations to address a range of customer performance and scale requirements.

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