Cognos' Mobile BI Product Extended To Nokia And Microsoft SmartphonesCognos' Mobile BI Product Extended To Nokia And Microsoft Smartphones

With Cognos' announcements Monday that it has extended its Cognos 8 Go! Mobile BI offering to support Windows Mobile 6 smartphones as well as Nokia's Eseries and Nseries families, it became more evident why IBM is paying $5 billion to acquire Cognos.

With the enterprise mobility market expected to grow by 30% a year through 2011, according to market researcher Gartner, Cognos is expected to provide a major share of that robust growth.

The Cognos BI offering enables users to get their decision-support information either over the Internet or over selected Nokia devices. The Cognos 8 Go! Mobile offering for Nokia devices is based on S60 3rd Edition Symbian OS.

"With the introduction of the Cognos 8 Go! Mobile application, Cognos and Nokia are extending business mobility beyond e-mail to yet another new area -- business intelligence," said Mika Laitinen, director of partner programs at Nokia Enterprise Solutions, in a statement.

Microsoft's general manager of global ISV partners, Eddie Amos, said the Cognos mobile BI offering helps Microsoft's customers leverage their existing systems when real-time interaction with key operational and financial performance information is involved. "Windows Mobile delivers a flexible platform so that companies can adopt the productivity tools and applications they need to maximize mobile productivity," Amos said in a statement.

Previously, Cognos 8 Go! Mobile had successfully operated on Research in Motion's BlackBerry, which has had high praise for the product because it can be used on both desktops and mobile devices.

IBM offered $5 billion last month for Cognos in an acquisition that consolidates the business intelligence market among a handful of providers that also includes Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.