Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Recently we've been talking a lot about how busy we are, connecting IBM Cognos BI and Esri maps and GIS in organizations just starting to realize the benefits of spatial analysis on their BI data. Those benefits can't be overstated, and so our busy schedule just keeps getting busier. It's one of the reasons the blog here has been a little quieter than usual of late.

But I have to share something from an event that happened last week. We'd built a custom demonstration for a very large organization in the US northeast. The actual requirements for this little proof of concept were laid out very clearly, involving spatial analysis of customer data and associated financials together with analytics based on some underlying geographical influencers. We met the stated requirements all squarely and in fact went beyond them in some key areas.

I helped build this little demonstration, but was not present for our actual presentation & demo, which reportedly was very well received. In fact, in a follow up conference call, one of the senior technical IT people from this company described to me his reaction to what he'd seen. After the demo he said to his boss:

"Did we just see what I think we saw?"

He was having a hard time believing that the response we'd put together (in just a couple of days, by the way) was entirely "out of the box", and was wondering just how much custom coding it had required. In fact, that question was the main reason for our follow-up conference call. They wanted to know exactly that: what had we done in terms of custom coding/extensions to meet their requirements.

So you can imagine how great it felt to tell him all about our approach: we had delivered a one hundred percent out-of-the-box, zero-coding solution to all of their stated business requirements. Not one line of code was used to integrate Esri map services into several key dashboards, in some amazingly effective ways.

We're getting used to this kind of reaction.

 - dk