Applied Business Intelligence

Cognos has been a leader in business intelligence applications for many years. Its core BI reporting products including PowerPlay and Impromptu have been adopted by thousands of companies throughout the world.  The Cognos products are good – but they are also quite expensive. The total cost of ownership for large organizations can easily run from several hundred thousand into the millions of dollars.  Also, the Cognos tools cannot operate in a vacuum. They require a data warehouse or some other set of data to report against.

Since Cognos does not offer its own database solution, users must also purchase a program like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server to support a data warehouse and an ETL program like Informatica to populate the data warehouse with data.   These extras can add several hundred thousand dollars or more to a business intelligence project.

At these high cost levels, it is easy to understand why the growth of business intelligence and data warehousing has been relatively slow. Most companies simply cannot afford the entry price. Even larger enterprises may find it difficult to justify the enormous cost of adopting a BI solution.  In addition, companies like Cognos charge on-going annual maintenance fees to its customers that routinely cost about 20% of the original purchase price.

Microsoft has leveled the playing field by making business intelligence affordable for companies of all sizes. In one package, Microsoft SQL Server provides a storage engine to build a robust data warehouse, an ETL package (Integration Services) that rivals Informatica, an analytical package (Analysis Services) that provides better functionality than PowerPlay, and a reporting development and server (Reporting Services) environment that provides similar functionality to Cognos 8.  

The cost of the enterprise version of Microsoft SQL Server is less than $10,000. In addition, you’ll need a client access license (about $150) for each user that will access the system. For large enterprises, you can purchase the package with unlimited clients for less than $25,000.

For standard reporting, Reporting Services provides a report development environment at no extra charge. Excel 2007 is the perfect tool for developing analytical reports from Analysis Services cubes. Office 2007 itself costs about $500 to purchase per copy.

Every company currently using Cognos or planning an upgrade or purchase of Cognos BI 8 should consider the purchase of the Microsoft BI products instead. In this era of cost containment, it clearly makes more sense to buy the Microsoft solution.  In summary, Microsoft BI provides similar or more functionality than the combination of Cognos, Oracle and Informatica at a substantially lower cost than what you would pay in one year of maintenance fees for those other products.