Access, Reporting, and BI Tools Spanning DualityIs Cognos ReportNet the answer to ad hoc and production reporting needs?by Eric Rogge Continued from Page 1 Framework ManagerEssential to ReportNet's foundation is its metadata model framework. Cognos provides ReportNet with a metadata layer to simplify usage, expand query flexibility, and simplify report management. This metadata layer is handled through the Framework Manager. Through this tool, developers and administrators create metadata models of underlying data sources. Descriptive information about underlying data sources is imported into a project. In turn, various queries, data relationships, computational expressions, user prompts, and data mappings are defined to provide a basis upon which to create reports.
Similar to other metadata-rich reporting technologies, ReportNet's framework provides a palette of data resources that lets report developers and ad hoc users quickly build data queries. Furthermore, Framework Manager lets you import metadata from Impromptu (for existing Cognos customers) and third-party data sources (for customers who are new to Cognos or have existing metadata in place, such as SAP BW). BI and ERPBI products are often joined to ERP systems to streamline the extraction of business information for management purposes. Many of today's reporting solutions are certified as compatible with various leading ERP vendor products, such as SAP R/3 and BW, PeopleSoft, and so forth. However, ReportNet sets the new standard for integration with SAP BW. Report developers can build queries into BW using its built-in data objects such as InfoCubes and InfoQueries. By expressing ReportNet queries in these terms, derived metrics are calculated in BW instead of ReportNet. Duplicate calculations are avoided, which results in reduced report quality assurance time and assured consistency with reports that leverage the same metrics. Other benefits include leveraging BW's calculated currency and measure unit conversion and multilingual support, as well as server-side, prefilter aggregation. By tightly integrating with BW, ReportNet provides a differentiated ability to bring BW's built-in functionality within the reach of report developers and ad hoc query users alike. (See Figure 2.) ReportNet accommodates a significant trend in the current BI market whereby BI is moving out of the department and into the enterprise. Businesses now view BI as strategic and are orchestrating enterprisewide deployment of BI applications. ReportNet accommodates this business need by including features that transform ReportNet into an enterprise-scale report and information hub. Specifically, ReportNet developers have added robust reliability, performance, and administration capabilities. Failover and restart for ReportNet processes are both supported within ReportNet to ensure reliability. Redirection of requests to functioning processes occurs at several levels within the ReportNet process stack. Dispatching tasks executing as peers on multiple machines will all cover for each other in the event of a failure. Threads and subordinate processes will be restarted automatically upon failure. Load balancing is also supported within ReportNet. Multiple load balance architectural options are available. Load balancing is managed on a round-robin basis with administrator-configurable capacity weighting for each available server queue. Wish ListAs good as this initial version of Cognos ReportNet is, some issues remain for you to consider when looking at ReportNet:
Actuate Corp., Crystal Decisions Inc., and Information Builders offer reporting technologies that are used in similar environments, but Cognos ReportNet has evolved the functionality to the next level. It's been in beta for nine months and a number of Cognos customers are about to deploy production systems. It's not often that a first version product is released that is as robust as ReportNet. It provides dual-purpose production and ad hoc reporting. It adds streamlined multilingual capabilities, report development resources, and robust enterprise system performance and reliability capabilities. Organizations that want a consistent approach to production and ad hoc reporting for business and IT will find Cognos ReportNet worth considering. Eric Rogge [eric.rogge@ventanaresearch.com] is research director of BI and Analytics at Ventana Research. Rogge has more than 20 years' experience with technology and software vendors in the analytic applications, enterprise software, and database software segments.
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