Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Say you want to change your Cognos security environment from one provider to another, Series 7 LDAP to Active Directory as an example.  Or how about migrating from two namespaces to one?  How about the other way around, from one to two?  Impossible, right?  Well, not so fast.

We have heard from a number of mid to large sized organizations that were close to throwing in the towel when it came to changing security applications and migrating their Cognos namespaces.  The task of migrating individual user policies, memberships, schedules, ownerships, folders, and more from one environment to another seems simple at first, then customers discover the complexities of the Cognos Content Store, and simple quickly turns to impossible.

Here are a handful of the technical roadblocks they ran into moving from existing to new namespace:

• Moving and accessing users My Folder content
• Migrating Schedule recipients information
• Maintaining integrity of Schedule owner and executer information
• Preserving user preference settings
• Migrating policies on content
• etc

We have a technology-enabled service that simplifies the auditing and reassigning of objects in the Content Store to the new authentication provider.  When we show folks how we approach the task, they initially look on with sceptical curiosity, and then they see it work. The scepticism turns into relief.

In our experience, helping customers get through this usually takes inside of a week or two.  One customer, prior to “finding us”, was planning on 6 to 9 months for their migration.  In two weeks we made some folks heroes in their company.

The way we see it, you have 3 options when looking to migrate your namespace:

1. Come to the conclusion that it is impossible and simply don’t change security providers.  This may not be an option for you.
2. Manually move every user and their policies from one environment to another – including copying My Folder content to a Public Folder, and then back to the new My Folder....  Hmmm, no thanks.  Too time consuming and too mistake riddled.
3. See if the SpotOn namespace migration service will work for you. 

Bottom line – you have to see it to believe it!

How are you planning your Cognos namespace migration?

We keep getting into these BI-GIS conversations, and it is sometime hard to know if we are acting as a "GBI translator", or just annoying people.  I suspect it's quite often the latter, but at least people remember us, right..?

A while back we were kindly asked to participate in a Proof of Technology session with a large insurance company.  Our topic was the technical integration of Cognos BI and Esri ArqGIS.  I kicked off the discussion with the suggestion that upon presentation of their geospatial reporting requirements, the BI vendor would propose a company dashboard targeted to 10,000 users that happened to include a map.  The GIS perspective would be an insanely rich and powerful location-based risk analysis application that would could be leveraged by a handful of GIS  analysts.

Two radically different solutions from the same set of requirements, and the right answer is likely between the two.  This got head nods and chuckles from the client, fairly  muted responses from the other vendors.

The crux of the issue is the hammer and nail analogy, your going to see the world through the perspective and strength of your solution. If you boil both BI and GIS solutions down to their essence, they are both simply information systems presenting business insight to users. 

Time to add the handsaw to the toolbox and start giving organizations the information they want and need.

PS; we haven't been invited back to another Proof of Technology since…

Hello all,

We’re going to shake this blog thing up a bit.  We had some good reasoning behind the decision to launch multiple topic-related blogs.  However, when you boil it all down to its essence, SpotOn exists to help organizations make their Cognos BI “fit”.  Lately the most prominent “fitting” that has been taking place is the inclusion of the spatial perspective (GBI) through the integration of ESRI GIS solutions with the Cognos BI foundation.  At other times its about integration with environments, authentication providers, performance tuning, or just helping clients to understand “how the damn stuff actually works under the covers!” 

Also, we didn’t post enough to make it work…  

So we’re going to bring everything together under one blog cover. 

A couple of mandates:

• Showcase some of the wizbangery that we’re putting together for clients and prospects – and the “why it might matter to you” business value
• Delve into Reporting Excellence and advanced charting and visualization in Cognos reports
• Explore the value of GBI solutions while recounting the interesting GBIS conversations that we find ourselves in
• Discuss BI integration and custom solutions: the good, bad, and everything in between

Plus all the other interesting things (read: shiny objects) that grab our attention and are (arguably…) worth sharing

Most of all, we want to have a conversation.  In our capacity as a IBM Cognos ISV Partner with a specialty niche and a decent reputation, we are exposed to some interesting (cool, wild, sometimes amazingly stupid, etc) stuff.  We’re going to try sharing more. 

Feel free to let us know what you’d like to hear about.  Tell us if you like something we’ve said, and tell us if you don’t.

We hope you enjoy the journey!

Hello all,

Apologies, it has been a while since our last update in the GBI blog - the marketing department keeps reminding that October was a long time ago.  Seems we (probably I) have been too busy with our "SpotOn Vantage World Tour 2009-10".  Rock On! (enterprise software style).

Highlights from the past 6 months:

• Webinar: Introduction to GBI
• IBM Information on Demand (IOD) Conference in Las Vegas
• Awarding of the IBM CTO Innovation award at IOD
• Sponsoring of IBM Cognos Performance Events:
  • Washington DC; Toronto; Los Angeles; Boston; Chicago
• Speaking at the ESRI Canada User Conference (see related post re: when the audience know more...)
• Newly minted ESRI Partnership: Developer and Reseller
• Webinar: Integrating Maps into IBM Cognos
• Exhibiting with IBM at the ESRI Federal Conference in DC
• Gold Sponsor of the IBM Cognos Federal Forum in DC
• Attending the ESRI Business Partner Conference in Palm Springs (see picture)

"Seriously, I'm at a conference... I told you these GIS guys are different!"

We've had whirlwind trips to Europe, and more trips to Redlands, CA than you can shake a stick at.  We have new people in the virtual shop, a newly minted partner tearing up the UK, and our good friend Freddy is about to light up another corner of Europe (stay tuned).

Most importantly, we've delivered - and are delivering, at an accelerated pace - on the promise of achieving a complete information perspective with our customers.  Bridging the geographic and the business dimensions to deliver the complete picture.

And boy, have we learned a bunch along the way!  Looking forward to sharing. 

co

Hi folks,

There is a whole lot of new going on around SpotOn these days.  We've got (still relatively) new awards on the wall, new faces around the office, and a freshly minted website - check it out!

We're also introducing a new blog, and relaunching the current Edges blog.  Based on the popularity of the Javascript Prompts and FM on the Web posts, we're going to focus the blog you are reading on the work we do on the edges of the Cognos BI solution; SDK development, customizations, extensions, and application integration.

We're also very excited to be launch our blog focusing on the value of integrating spatial awareness with your IBM Cognos reports.  Geographic Business Intelligence (GBI) is something that will be on your radar in short order, if it is not already.  Please join us in the conversation.

Chris

In a long-winded post on the IBM Cognos Forum a couple of weeks ago, I made mention of "hardware".  Here is a photo of Darren and I procuring said hardware:

Yep, the burly guy on the left is holding the award for the 2009 IBM Cognos Global ISV Technology Partner of the Year.  This award was in recognition of the ESRI integration capabilites delivered through our SpotOn Vantage solution.

It is a tremendous honor and we are very thankful.  This year is cueing up to be a very exciting, insanely hectic, journey into the domain of location intelligence for IBM Cognos customers.  Hope to have you all aboard!

Hi all - we're now two weeks removed from what might be referred to as the last "old school" Cognos Forum in Orlando, FL.  We won't lie, there was much trepidation going in.  Having decided to invest as a Gold Sponsor in the Performance World for the second year in a row, there was much hand-wringing over the ability to recoup this year's investment going into the event.  News was that registration was hovering at less than a 1/3 of the last year's numbers going in.  A molasses-like economy and swine flu rage - which I believe was a news epidemic more than anything else, but what do I know - had folks anticipating disaster going in.

Guess what, it was a fantastic event!  I'm confident that this will end up being SpotOn's most profitable Forum in the four we've attended as partners.  When they started throwing IBM Cognos staff out of the fancy hotel, it was a positive sign that there was a rush on last minute registrations.  And when you think about it, when times are tough and dollars are tight, if companies send people to a conference you know that they are looking for tangible information and likely have budget and a buying agenda.  This was reflected in the nature of the conversations we had with Cognos customers. 

I've also become a firm believer that you can only "be" one thing at a conference like this - unless you are a household name.  Yes, SpotOn can do many things (some would say "anything" with our SDK prowess) but at this event we were the people that put ESRI map into Cognos reports.  How do you know?  Because it is on the 42 inch monitor at our booth, in your face when you walked through the door.

We also had tremendous access to senior Cognos and IBM personal this year.  I met, and had tremendous conversations, with executives from Services, Worldwide Cognos Sales, Cognos Partners and Alliances, and leaders of the IBM Software Group.  Already these meetings are proving very fruitful with several ongoing dialogs.

Also it didn't hurt to have some major "hardware" sitting on our booth.  And I'm not talking about servers and storage here, my friends.  But we'll save that story for next week.

Great to see old friends - and make some new ones.  I'm interested to see how the Cognos Forum we know and love gets folded into the Information On Demand event in October 2010.  I just hope we don't lose that Forum Magic.

Here is the deal; we have been very active recently in helping folks integrate high-end enterprise mapping (GIS) with Cognos 8 BI.  We've come to the conclusion that there is real value in bringing the geographic perspective to your core BI.  Hence we have gravitated to the following definition of GBI.

Perhaps influenced by the backgrounds and experience of the folks at SpotOn, we believe that BI is the foundation for GBI.  BI has been the top technology priority for CIOs for almost a decade now.  Companies count on BI for their mission-critical operations.

However, the impact and power of spatial analytics and GIS solutions are staggering.  These tools can deliver unprecedented insight into businesses, and the key operations relation to location.

The goal of this blog will be to share the learning and adventures as we collectively explore the world where Geography and BI meet.

Let get past the "why" and "what", and start digging into the "Where"!   

Every organization supports their clients. Few organizations succeed with their clients. That's the "ah-hah!" moment I had recently while Chris and I were discussing how to handle client issues. As a former Cognoid, I know how large organizations manage calls from customers. There are several key metrics used in call centers such as AHT (average handle time) or call cost per minute, to measure the efficiency of an operation. I think these are very beneficial tools to use when dealing with huge numbers of calls on many different products.

In a small organization like ours, we deal with client calls regarding product issues as well. The difference is that we know our clients much better than someone staffing a 24 hour terminal. That's why we no longer want to reactively support our clients but rather, proactively succeed with them. How did we pinpoint this? In a recent revenue opportunity with one of our trusted partners, an issue arose around a particularity with their client's environment. I'm sure we've all encountered this before. So, the partner followed our support process, our staff responded exactly the way they should have responded - if we were a large call center. That is to say, SpotOn assessed the issue, requested the required information, and delivered the solution. The problem with that was, the solution didn't solve the problem and an entire day went by.

So here it is: The line in the sand. SpotOn clients and partners, we're going to succeed together, rather than solving individual issues as they pop up!

- Darren

Last week we had one of our sharp young Solution Architects, Pierre Seguin, attend a discussion on virtualization.  At SpotOn we're actively thinking about the management of Cognos BI in virtual-type deployments.  Pierre has kindly shared his notes and thoughts from the discussion:  

Virtualization has been around for a long time but as of late it has absolutely exploded. With good hardware support, software support, and the need for organizations to consolidate their server assets, this wave of virtualization seems to be here to stay for a while. On this note I attended The Cutting Edge on Virtualization panel discussion hosted by The Ottawa Network on Wednesday. The panel consisted of Mike Kemp, CTO of Liquid Computing, Jean-Marc Seguin, Chief Architect of Embotics, and the founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay. I wasn't sure what to expect but it turned out that the talk was pretty interesting. Here's my take on the events of the day.

They started out by outlining the state of the art in virtualization. The consensus seemed to be that when it comes to individual virtual machines the tools and hardware are there to support them in the main stream (and in fact all large organizations are currently doing this). Xen, VMWare, Intel VT-x, Itanium based virtualization, Solaris virtualization stack, the list goes on. The basic virtualization hardware and software is there and mature. The big problem today is the management of large virtualized environments. Bringing machines up, putting them down, moving them to different hardware, monitoring them, etc. This is all done by either a restrictive framework (ex. Solaris virtualization stack) or in most cases a completely different hodgepodge of tools at each organization. At some point in the future a large corporation (cough IBM) will inevitably come in and introduce open standards to support virtualized environment management. In the mean time we make due. The consensus is that this is some years off. Current work in virtualization (of which Liquid Computing and Embotics are heavily involved in) is concentrated on making management tools that can be used to describe, deploy and monitor virtualized environments on the fly. This is to say nothing about doing the same for application tier components that exist in the virtualized space.

The other aspect that was talked about was how virtualization is used in the dev/QA environment. The founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay, was one of the panel members. His company does custom development for many different clients.  Sound familiar? Have you ever had a client come back 6 months after you've completed a project and ask for new features? You're thinking ‘Great!' so you start to get to work only to find out your development and testing environments for the project have been cannibalized by other, more current projects. So, you go back to square one and set up the test environment from scratch just to get to the work they want you to do. It's all very tedious. To solve this problem his company has leveraged virtualization. His virtualization system consists of 55 virtual machines of which any 15 can be running simultaneously. So when a customer needs a new feature or bug fix they simply load the virtual machine associated with the project and bang! They're off to the races. We have had some good talks internally and are unanimous that this is a great fit for us too. This has become pretty standard in the industry and it's time we get on board.

All in all a very interesting field where opportunities seem to exist around every corner. Either internally for dev/QA streamlining or externally for creating the plethora of tools that will be needed to bring virtualization to the next level within the enterprise. We'll have to see where it takes us.

Pierre