New Major Releases: Cognos Express 9.5 and TM1 9.5.2

This time I would like to briefly cover two major releases of IBM’s Business Analytics offering. Having sat through various partner presentations and already installed these new releases at clients I can say this time it’s definitely bigger than just a version number increase.

On the Cognos Express platform

Let me put IBM into perspective regarding performance management (hold on for a bit as this is quite relevant for our review):

Apart from the obvious (IBM’s position as a leader) the interesting bit is who’s not on the list of the traditional BI vendors: Microsoft, Microstrategy, the upcoming challengers like Tableau and Qlikview. If you take a look at the BI platforms’ quadrant [link] this difference becomes quite apparent. For Performance Management applications you need some sort of planning component which at its very core is based on (OLAP) writeback, still a rather rare capability. While we’re at it I would strongly suggest to go for an environment (both on a software and logical level) where planning (incl. simulation) and analytical capabilities are not ‘far’ from each other. In real life such activities are not clearly separated either.

So what we have with Cognos Express 9.5 is a mature (2nd major version), purpose built and integrated platform featuring standardized reporting, ad-hoc analysis and planning coupled with the power and flexibility of an excel-friendly in-memory analytic server (TM1 – more on that later). If used well this can be truly powerful especially for mid-size companies the product is aimed at. With its price tag [link: http://blog.pervasivepm.com/2011/02/04/ibm-extends-cognos-express.aspx?ref=rss ] it is affordable and provides great value for the money.

Nevertheless we have not reached nirvana yet. I do have to agree with Stephen Few’s remarks [link: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=915 ] that traditional BI companies are still not great at usability, data sense-making, collaboration and visualization. But after years spent with acquisitions and integration I see there is a new direction (and roadmap) to include innovations of the upcoming generation of Qlikview, Tableau and the like.

If you still feel an unfilled gap in your requirements take a look at the emerging desktop analytics products (like PowerPivot, shipped freely with MS Office 2010) but I would advise not to miss the opportunity a unified platform offers.

Cognos TM1, 9.5.2

I would like to avoid praising TM1 too much, as I am obviously biased. Let me just state that it is the swiss army knife of business modeling, planning and (calculation intensive) analytics. Technically it stands out being a 64bit capable in-memory MOLAP server with an extremely fast calculation engine. Practically this means query times of sub or few seconds at hundreds of megabytes of data and hundreds of chained business rules (defined through excel-like user-friendly expressions, not ‘code’) – real-time as data is entered or modified. If you haven’t done so yet check it out: this video [ link or embed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8hWboy4lQY ] demonstrating its financial analytics capabilities would be a good start – fast forward to 2:50 to see it in action, but check the first half afterwards as well – it just makes more sense in this order.

Back in the days before Cognos acquired TM1 from Applix it has been reviewed separately in the (then) OLAP Survey, so to give you the feel about its reception I have included some charts from the 6th edition, 2007 – most of this still stands true today.

The reason the 9.5.2 release really stands out is scalability and performance improvement. TM1 has long been an enterprise product, but as most IT systems did not handle well high level of concurrent writes typical in a planning application during the budgeting period. In prior versions to ensure consistency reads were blocked until writes finished and new writes could not start before reads in the ‘queue’ finished as illustrated by the following diagram:

To work around these limits many models have been engineered (referred to as partitioning) to avoid this kind of lock ‘contention’.

Enter Parallel Interaction. As the name implies it enables parallel data entry and loading:

Metadata modifications (like dimension updates / hierarchy changes) still block, but that’s acceptable. To take advantage of PI it has to be explicitly enabled with the ParallelInteraction=T configuration option and ample extra memory and CPU capacity should be planned in, as the due to the individual versions or ‘snapshots’ of data views memory consumption is expected to rise between 10-30%. PI also makes good use of those extra cores found in today’s processors – a welcomed improvement as TM1 has historically been single threaded.

The improvements should become noticeable with tens of users, and significant (>80%) above hundred users. I am definitely planning to test it at customers so after the next budgeting cycle this article will likely get an update.

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