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Cognos Testing PowerPlay Enterprise Server

Business intelligence vendor Cognos Corp. (www.cognos.com) has entered beta testing with a server-side component of its PowerPlay OLAP tool.

Cognos plans to make PowerPlay Enterprise Server generally available by February. PowerPlay Enterprise Server is phase three in a four-phase strategy to extend the traditionally client-side PowerPlay OLAP tool to thousands of users via servers and the Web.

Rob Rose, Cognos’ vice president of product marketing, says the Ottawa company is consciously emphasizing the server aspect of its tool.

"We recognize that Cognos in the past has been viewed as a client vendor. I think we want to come out loud and clear that the predominant way for almost a year now that we’ve sold Cognos is on a server, and this clinches it for us," Rose says.

PowerPlay is best known as a tool for analyzing multi-dimensional databases on the desktop. In July, Cognos delivered PowerPlay Server Web Edition 6.0, which allowed deployment of OLAP exploration and analysis across the Web. In September, Cognos introduced features in PowerPlay 6.0 geared to enterprise OLAP reporting and report authoring.

As phase three, Enterprise Server introduces support for several deployment options, including browser-based access, a thin-client for Windows and a "personal server" option that allows a mobile user to download part of an OLAP cube to a machine for off-line analysis.

Cognos designed Enterprise Server as the foundation for a Web-based managed reporting solution for OLAP reporting to be added to PowerPlay in mid-1999. --Scott Bekker, Staff Reporter

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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