Cognos launches financial consolidation applications

In response to the latest external reporting requirements from the Feds, Cognos announced this week three additions to its suite of financial applications targeted at the enterprise office of finance.

Cognos Controller 2.3 adds a financial consolidation tool to its applications portfolio, a must-have module that has been missing from its financial suite up until now.

Paul Hamerman, vice president of enterprise applications at Forrester Research, said that although it is important to have a first-rate financial consolidation tool, Cognos is playing catchup with Hyperion and the ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle who already offer this.

“It is hard to differentiate these products, but it is a must-have,” said Hamerman.

Built on an open database platform, Controller 2.3 supports Oracle or SQL Sever and is completely Web-enabled.

It is also integrated with Microsoft’s analysis tools for OLAP reporting. Other features are a currency management feature for conversion during consolidation, a legal entity ownership feature, and support for digital signatures. 

According to Doug Barton, vice president of product marketing at Cognos, statutory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing vendors to create a new generation of reporting tools.

“The challenge from our customers is compliance. You can’t have inadequate controls. A lot of investment is happening to improve and automate finance and corporate reporting modules to deliver an enterprisewide view of corporate performance,” Barton said.

The second module released this week is Cognos Planning Series 7 Version 3.  An upgrade to a previous product, the planning module is a high-end planning and budgeting tool with some functional enhancements.

For example, instead of having administrative privileges controlled centrally, the module now permits distributed administration.

Other features include component-based planning modules which will allow business users to connect their plan to other planning processes across the enterprise, and a uniform CPM (Cognos Performance Management) UI. All related performance management tasks such as planning, reporting, analysis, and score carding will have the same interface.

Cognos is also packaging up data models and planning templates as Plan-to-Perform Blueprints. According to Hamerman, this will give users more out-of-the box functionality.

“These planning products and budgeting solutions have generally been tools rather than applications. This will save a great deal of configuration time,” Hamerman said.

Five sets of blueprints are currently available: expense planning, head count and compensation planning, sales planning and forecasting, capital expenditure, and strategic financial planning.

All three applications are shipping now.