Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Darren often suggests that I go "produce some marketing fluff".  At this point I feign outrage and usually threaten to write code.  A bit of a cold war style standoff!

However we have had some interest in understanding the concept of working on the Cognos Edges.  Truth be told, the Cognos extension and integration specialty was an area that SpotOn gravitated to rather than chose.  Furthermore, what seems obvious now (with Darren and team's SDK and architectural expertise) was not so clear in the beginning.  Of course you focus on the authoring and modeling services because that is that is where the large chunk of work is.  There are only a couple of organizations that need the SDK "heavy-lifting"...

Some kind of marketer I turned out to be.  What we found ourselves in was a niche, underserved market (shared with our friends down in Dallas) with clearly identifiable customer needs, with extremely high value and business impact to prospective clients.

I've also been accused of "reading books and telling us what to do".  If they don't like it, they should read the damn books!  It was in reading the Blue Ocean Strategy (http://blueoceanstrategy.com/) that the concept of working on the Cognos Edges emerged.  The concept in the book was how companies outpaced competitors by creating solutions in the space "in between": in between markets, applications, existing distribution channels, etc.  Trust me, it's a great book.

The concept that struck home was that SpotOn experienced great success once we got outside the Cognos box - on the Edge.  In these cases we were creating value in between the Cognos platform and the places organizations want to take their BI.  We've identified 4 key edges where SpotOn has consistently created value:

• 1. Look and feel, branding, custom UIs
• 2. Administration, Data & Metadata Automation
• 3. New Functionality & Product Extensions
• 4. Application Integration

It's this last Edge, Application Integration, that has our team really fired up these days.  We think we're on to a real 1+1=3 opportunity for our clients - we're going to make the BI sizzle.  Maybe make people go crazy like at the GIS Conference!  Who knows!?!