Q&A: Cognos' Rob Ashe on Performance Management, Aligning With IBMQ&A: Cognos' Rob Ashe on Performance Management, Aligning With IBM

Cognos has been focusing heavily on performance management, yet some say that market is very narrowly focused on financial performance management. Is that true for Cognos?

About half of the [performance management] applications we sell get deployed outside of finance. That's mostly in operational areas such as head-count planning, volume planning and you name the business optimization challenge. We see a growing percentage of activities reaching outside of finance. Obviously that's not happening with products such as Consolidation, but it's true of Cognos 8 Planning and it's the same with Applix TM1. These products are [rooted in] finance disciplines, but they're often applied to other areas of the company.

What's the strategy to help companies broaden performance management into operational areas?

I think you have to look at it in terms of supply and demand. On the supply side, now that companies can integrate BI and performance management, we're seeing them extend planning applications out into operational areas and add BI [reporting] on top of that. Some customers were ahead of the curve and were demanding that capability.

Does the demand extend beyond planning?

Yes, it extends to solutions and blueprints that are very specific to key vertical areas and to scorecarding and dashboarding for operational performance management. It's also about connecting all that to the financial performance management areas that we all know and love.

We've talked about moving performance management out to operational areas, but what about moving it up to the strategic level that Kaplan and Norton talk about?

If you look at all the know-how that we have worked with our customers to produce, from the blueprints to the The Performance Manager book that we published, all of those things are efforts to try to move toward the things Kaplan and Norton talk about in terms of tying strategy to execution.

But you don't see the market there yet?

No. Only a few leading companies have really done it.

Switching to the new competitive climate, Oracle, with Hyperion, and SAP, with Business Objects, say they'll be embedding BI and analytics into their applications. Can IBM/Cognos do that as tightly or with the same intimate knowledge of the applications?

We're at a maturity level in the market at which these things are going to have to exist side by side. We have plenty of big SAP customers, and SAP is not going to go to them and say we're not going to support Cognos because we can offer Business Objects embedded. Nor are they going to go to IBM and say "we're no longer going to [support IBM infrastructure.] Obviously there will be a bit of shift in the center of gravity in the offerings you'll see from vendors, but they'll continue to openly support software from other suppliers.

But if a customers has SAP or Oracle applications, could they find it more compelling to get the embedded BI or analytics from the same vendor?

If that was really compelling, those vendors would have achieved their goals by now. They've been embedding BI and analytics for a while. Things like Siebel Analytics would have been much more popular outside of the Siebel customer base. A lot of BI technology has been developed as extensions of ERP and CRM systems, but customers have to consider a couple of different levels. There's a broader view of performance management in which it's not just an extension of an application, and in that view it has to support many transaction applications.

I'd concede that in point solutions, tight integration [of BI and analytics] can be compelling, but for customers that have a broader view of performance management — and more customers do have a broader view — then we're competing as we normally complete.

Lots of your customers work with independent integrators, and you have said there will be a "firewall" between Cognos and IBM Global Services. Can you explain?

We have significant relationships with Accenture, BearingPoint, Deloitte Touche, CapGemini as well as growing relationships with the Indian boutiques. The reality of the market is that there is now cooperation and competition in just about every relationship given all of the recent acquisitions. As an example, not so long ago, Cognos bought its Siebel customer-support system from IBM. IBM fully intends to play in the fuller marketplace, so it needs to be able to partner with other players. We'll have to work hard with each partner so that they see that we're going to live up to [having a firewall], but it's just the way of the future.