At Comdex this week in Chicago, Cognos will announce a partnership with Research in Motion (RIM) that extends the reach of Cognos' new alert and notification system, NoticeCast, to RIM's Blackberry device.
The feature will be added to the Cognos series 7 line of business intelligence products that debuted in November.
"(NoticeCast) lets you push notification from our software to SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) for email alerts," said Meg Dussault, director of Product Marketing at Cognos in Ottawa, Canada. "We can ping you as soon as a critical piece of data changes."
"RIM does wireless email very well," said Peter Melandra, senior manager for strategic alliances at Cognos. "Now we can use that channel to push business intelligence content out to mobile professionals."
Dussault said NoticeCast is powered by new agent software that can monitor operational and transactional systems. "Our agents can recognize patterns or thresholds and send alerts to the right recipients. If you are a branch officer at a bank, for example, you might want to know immediately if a mortgage is about to come to term."
Bob Moran, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston, Mass. said this kind of software is analogous to network management software. "Instead of monitoring the net, you are monitoring the business," said Moran. "Cognos is really delivering a business hub. The RIM partnership is another shining asterisk in their new, series 7 line."
Dussault said Cognos plans to work with RIM to add more business intelligence features to next generation RIM devices. "The issue is no longer about getting the data," said Dussault, "but how can we make the most efficient use of it."