IBM aims Cognos Express at mid-market

IBM has repositioned its corporate Business Intelligence (BI) software at mid-sized companies for the first time.

The company's new IBM Cognos Express package, using technology from IBM's successful buy-out of Cognos, aims to bring BI to companies with under a thousand employees.

To do this the company has said it has rewritten its code so that it can scale down to the smaller business who is looking to merge databases.

“This is not just a repackaging exercise,” Caroline Seymour, an business unit executive at IBM Cognos said.

“We've spent many thousands of man-hours on this. It's purpose built for mid-sized companies.”

The software suite comes with three modules: Express Reporter, Express Advisor, and Express Xcelerator. They use Excel formatting to link into existing spreadsheets, build business information charts via a web format.

Reporter is the base level package for linking data together for the basic user, while Advisor gives more predictive capability and visualistion. The company claims Xcelerator pushes these capabilities deeper for more advanced business modelling.

The cost for this is US$12,000 for a single module or up to US$25 per user per month. Companies can buy on a modular basis or get the whole package, depending on their IT resources.

“When you are ready to buy the next one then it just plugs in,” said Seymour.

“It's about minimising the impact on IT. IT might not be happy about implementing on its own; its about a partnership with management.”