Cognos Offers Business Intelligence For Salesforce.comCognos Offers Business Intelligence For Salesforce.com

Cognos is offering its namesake business intelligence tools to customers of Salesforce.com through the latter company's third-party application marketplace.

Cognos 8 is listed on AppExchange as an additional service to Salesforce.com's on-demand, customer-relationship management software. Salesforce.com subscribers would pay an additional charge for the BI services.

Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled a major upgrade of its software as a service product. The San Francisco company also launched enhancements to its SaaS platform, including new tools for third-party software vendors to build products that share the same data model as the CRM vendor.

AppExchange is the online directory for 500 ISV-built applications. Third-party vendors are not allowed to contact Salesforce.com customers directly, but can pay for joint marketing and sales.

Besides listing its BI tools in AppExchange, Cognos plans to offer in the first half of the year a data adapter for Salesforce.com that provides direct access to the latter company's data, and the ability to capture the information over time and combine it with other historical and transactional data, Cognos said. In addition, Salesforce.com customers would be able to view and interact with BI information within the context of other environments, such as an enterprise portal, Microsoft Office, or mobile devices.

Aon Corp., which provides risk management services, said in a joint statement with Cognos that it is using the BI vendor's tools with Salesforce.com to determine the effectiveness of Aon's sales and marketing efforts.

“Using Cognos 8 BI for sales and marketing reporting against Salesforce, and our marketing automation tools, Aon gains a complete view of program effectiveness worldwide," Joe Demmler, vice president of marketing operations for Aon, said. "With Cognos, we can turn vast amounts of data into actionable information and drive more effective sales and marketing performance throughout the organization.”