Atlanta Licenses Cognos BIAtlanta Licenses Cognos BI

The City of Atlanta has licensed Cognos's business intelligence platform as the software foundation of its citywide performance management initiative.

The Canadian company on Thursday said it was a "multi-million-dollar partnership," but did not disclose financial details. Under the agreement, Cognos 8 would become the platform for Atlanta Stat, an initiative to provide reports, scorecards and analytics from city department data sources to more than 1,500 officials, from the mayor to individual managers.

Cognos 8 will aggregate data from PeopleSoft business applications and a variety of other stores, Cognos said. The company's partner Sky Solutions assisted with the pilot phase of the program, and would continue working with Cognos consulting services to complete the deployment. A timetable was not disclosed.

Meanwhile, Cognos customers planning to use the recently launched IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition can integrate the free search engine with Cognos 8 through the platform's Go Search technology, a Cognos offiial said. The latter product indexes reports, scorecards and other metric content to make keyword-searching possible with third-party tools. Besides the IBM-Yahoo software, Go Search also supports Google's search appliances.

IBM is offering OmniFind Yahoo Edition at no charge, apparently hoping to lure customers, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, away from Google, which has been very successful in the market.

Finally, Cognos has released its fiscal third quarter financial results, which showed a 24 percent increase is software license revenue from the same period a year ago to $94 million. License revenue is a key indicator of how well a software company is doing.

Overall revenues were up 17 percent in the quarter ended Nov. 30 to $247.8 million. Net income on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) fell to $16.5 million, or 18 cents a share, from $24 million, or 26 cents a share, a year ago. The decline was due primarily to stock-based compensation expense and restructuring charges.

For the fourth quarter, Cognos expects revenues in the range of $270 million to $280 million, and GAAP-based earnings of 54 cents to 60 cents a share. For the full year, the company is predicting revenues from $965 million to $975 million, and GAAP earnings from $1.14 to $1.20 a share.