Cognos TM1 User Day/Conference

[Martin Ryan]

As promised, a run down of the day...

Intro
Movie-trailer style intro complete with American voice over talking about performance and images of a car racing around a hilly road.

Ged Simmons (runs UK and Ireland)
Talked about Cognos 8 version 4. Apparently BI is still CIO's main agenda item. As he sees it, most businesses are moving from using IT/BI for business automation - i.e. doing repetitive jobs quicker - to business optimisation, looking for insight.

Businesses need to be asking themselves "How are we doing?" "Why?" "What should we be doing?"

He's working to get the interface consistent across the Cognos range, which suggests a facelift for TM1 is on the cards.

Innovation Centre (Stephen Brook)
He talked about the innovation centre which sounds like a good idea. Essentially it's made up of three parts, the customer community, some "thought leaders" and white papers.

One of the things I liked most about the innovation centre was the Blueprints. Models are developed to deal with a range of situations such as finance, ops, sales, marketing and HR as well as industry specific: retail, financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, public services, consolidations. Users are free to download the Blueprint models and do with them as they see fit. I hope this will extend to TM1 as it sounds similar to Steve Rowe's idea of data benchmarking and will give us a model to compare versions and hardware against to see performance. Also good for people new to the product to get something to work from and adapt to their needs.

Navman (client case study)
Cognos 8 specific. Navman were bought out and had a new ERP dumped on them so had to quickly whack together reporting and analytical tools. Not the most dynamic presenter, but sounds like a good implementation.

Damien Hirst (Accountancy Age journalist)
Gave a bleak run down of the global financial outlook and said that the main thing on CFO's minds at the moment is cash. Best presenter.

Brian Gleek (IT magazine journalist)
- Says past experience of such economic downturns suggest that innovative users of IT will emerge the strongest.
- The number of IT students are dropping.
- Sees a rise in Software as a Service applications with monthly/per person fees, rather than large initial outlays.
- Outsourcing and offshoring will increase.
- IT still not fully engaged with the business, though 97% of companies agree that it is important
- His main point was that IT and Business (Ops and Finance) relationships need to be tighter. Otherwise they may be outsourced

Panel discussion (Q&A with the previous presenters)
- Communication between IT and business crucial
- Understanding your business is vital in cash tight times. Sophisticated analysis aids that
- Good, relevant question from the floor on how to standardise BI in a company that has multiple tools. Poorly answered I felt and I think it's becoming a more important question with the M&A activity that's happened in the last few years which will now settle down into day-to-day ops. My feeling is you need strong leaders who are prepared to make unpopular decisions. Interested in other people's thoughts.

TM1 Session
Martin Richmond-Coggan opened the session very positive about TM1's position in Cognos and IBM.

Gold Medal Travel (Customer case study)
Typical TM1 implementation that went typically well

Product Update (Mark White)
Quick recap of 9.0 (redid TM1 Web completely, changed icons) and 9.1 (non IE support for TM1 Web, enhanced EV including ability to embed live reports in Powerpoint, rules editor, action buttons, new online doco, non TM1 files in application folders).

9.4
- Introduces split security - security admin and data admin
- Metadata logging including dimension and rule updates
- Excel 2007, Vista and 64 bit IIS support
- Workflow enhancements (the old Planning Manager)
- Active forms (complete redo of dynamic slices)
- C8 BI integration, including security (this is optional. Standalone TM1 is still fine)
- Unicode for globalisation and long strings

As hoped for, Mark did a live demo, joking that he thought he was safe because his colleague (Jason) wasn't there who always managed to have something go wrong. His demo showed off Active forms to good effect. They look streets ahead of dynamic slices and the integration with TM1Web did seem tight. Also demoed running a TI process from Excel and flipping between sheets with the new "Action button". Their aim seems to be eliminating the need for VBA. The integraton with Cognos 8 looked quite good, including spreading.
It wasn't all roses, Mark pulled the cord twice to give a blue screen on the overhead. Also his demo of inserting a new element via the Cognos 8 integration didn't succeed, but it wouldn't be a TM1 demo if everything went smoothly!

Product Roadmap (Dave Corbett)
First slide was a disclaimer effectively saying everything may change, but this is the current idea. It was very wordy so not sure if it said "don't tell anyone" - if anyone saw such a thing please let me know and I'll have to delete this section.

First off he answered a series of FAQ that he's fielding at the moment.
- Will TM1 be aimed at Mid Market or Enterprise customers? Both (see mid market below)
- Will TM1 have a dependence on Cognos 8? No. 9.4 has an opt-in and this will continue but it will not be required.
- Which Planning solution will win? Cognos Enterprise Planning or TM1? A blended solution leveraging technology and functionality from both is liklely. TM1 will be the enginge. Cognos planning, modelling, workflow and rich contribution client will be Cognos' contribution. Will be out in 2009 sometime.
- What is the future of websheets? Strong and Active Forms makes it stronger
- Is EV going away? No, EV will be crucial to the mid market edition. EV will still support MS AS and Essbase
- Is TM1 replacing PowerCubes? No. Powercubes good for big volume, but read only. TM1 good for complex analysis and writeback.
- Has Cognos figured out how to automate feeders yet? Erm, no.

Other points
- Dave positive about TM1/Cognos because TM1 brings write back to C8 and the IBM channel is helping sales, particularly with big companies.
- TM1 mid market edition will bundle EV and TM1 (free of Cognos) and be pitched to companies with less than 1000 employees.
- C8 will have a central place for dimension maintenance called "Business Viewpoint"
- Next Gen planning tool idea looks good. Uses TM1 as the engine and will use a lot of Cognos' front end tools
- 9.4 MR1 should be released in December mostly fixing a few active form issues but also allows paging for websheets
- Spread undo IS COMING. They've got the back end sorted, just sorting out the front end.

The distant future
- Named hierarchies
- Java functions in TI
- Intelligent invalidations of precalc'd numbers

Drinks
Went to the pub after, ended up as just the old TM1 diehards, but good to catchup and also put a few faces to forum names. Dave Corbett took a bit of an ear bashing from some inebriated partners! But, as always, he listened to it well and took on board the good points within the odd rant.

Martin's summary
Pretty good day. Morning was Cognos centric with hardly a peep about TM1. Mark White displayed some nice functionality through Active Forms. Dave Corbett was very bullish on TM1 in the afternoon session and even more so when listening to concerns at the pub. It would seem that TM1 still has a very strong independent and integrated future in the Cognos family.

As a side note, Dave was also interested in the reasons for the genesis of the forum and said it was being monitored by Cognos staff on occassion.

[jim wood]

Martin,

Great report matey cheers. I wasn't able to go as the room has not stopped spinning since last Tuesday.

It doesn't sound like anything suprising came up. It was more about reassurance more than anything. (Well that's the impression I got anyway)

The product road map is the only concern. It seems change all the time. They are even putting slides up first so we don't hold them to their current plan.

I'll try to catch up with some of the others that made it. Many thanks though Martin,

Jim.

PS. Did you tell Dave that the Cognos customer community site is crap? What other reason could there be for this site!!

[John Hobson]

Spread undo IS COMING.
...

Dave Corbett took a bit of an ear bashing from some inebriated partners!

I should make it clear at this point that I was NOT there

Thanks Martin - I think my decision not to spend a fortune on hotels and trains to attend was probably the right one from the sound of it., although it would have been nice to listen to Mr Richmond Coggan and his chums again.

As a side note, Dave was also interested in the reasons for the genesis of the forum and said it was being monitored by Cognos staff on occassion.

PS. Did you tell Dave that the Cognos customer community site is crap? What other reason could there be for this site!!

Haha! I would have thought that that was a statement of the bleeding obvious, and it's a bit worrying that the person in charge of software development would need that pointing out or explaining as it means he either has never visited his own forum or he doesn't have a clue about user expectations (or maybe he just gets a VIP connection )

[Martin Ryan]

PS. Did you tell Dave that the Cognos customer community site is crap? What other reason could there be for this site!!

Stephen W put it a little more politely than that (but only a little!). I outlined the three main problems were the speed of Cognos Communities, the fact that email addresses were used as login names, and the loss of alumni and people who are slack paying maintenance. He agreed they were valid concerns.

Whether or not that will result in anything changing remains to be seen. I would guess not, because any change will have to be Cognos wide and that makes it a major change.

Martin

[Alan Kirk]

PS. Did you tell Dave that the Cognos customer community site is crap? What other reason could there be for this site!!

Stephen W put it a little more politely than that (but only a little!). I outlined the three main problems were the speed of Cognos Communities, the fact that email addresses were used as login names, and the loss of alumni and people who are slack paying maintenance. He agreed they were valid concerns.

Whether or not that will result in anything changing remains to be seen. I would guess not, because any change will have to be Cognos wide and that makes it a major change.

Excellent summary with some useful information, thanks for that Martin. The idea of names hierarchies sounds interesting; that'd be useful here.

I'm not sure I buy the "software as service" concept; that's been around ever since that... expletive deleted... Larry Ellison was evangelising the idea of the "thin client" network PC over 10 years ago. The problems that existed then are the same as those that exist now; (a) not every computer is connected to a network every minute of the day (b) giving your data to an outside entity is ALWAYS going to be an order of magnitude less secure than keeping it in-house (something that the more dimwitted outsourcing evangelists will probably find out about in time, not that they'll care as they'll have already jumped with a golden parachute after they've "restructured" their companies and "saved" them costs) and (c) if the company that provides said software goes belly up then your business is going to be in a world of hurt. Actually there are others but we could be here all day on that topic.

Yes, I recall Navman being taken over and broken up. Couldn't happen to a more deserving organisation. (Disgruntled owner of a Navman PiN 100 speaking.)

As far as Cognos Communities goes, for my money the fourth key issue (that they'll never address) is the censorship one. Frankly having tasted the freedom of a user-supported community and liked it, and found that it's no less robust in content terms than that of an "official" forum, I see no reason at all to ever go back even if they sort out issues 1 to 3.

[TJMurphy]

Thanks for the summary Martin. And was good to be introduced to you on the day as well. Shame I couldn't make the drinks but I had a car and Twickenham was completely the wrong direction for me.

I mentioned the slow, slow, slow forum to the Cognos lady who was on the Training booth. She didn't seem to know anything about it but sort of promised she'd mention it to someone else. Not sure I'd hold out much hope on that side though

Tony

[jim wood]

Thanks for the summary Martin. And was good to be introduced to you on the day as well. Shame I couldn't make the drinks but I had a car and Twickenham was completely the wrong direction for me.

I mentioned the slow, slow, slow forum to the Cognos lady who was on the Training booth. She didn't seem to know anything about it but sort of promised she'd mention it to someone else. Not sure I'd hold out much hope on that side though

Tony

Hi Tony,

I wouldn't hold your breathe. One of things we are going to ave to get used to as TM1 users now is that it is owned by a big company. When Applix had it all you to do was sneeze at them and they reacted pretty well. Now the machine that is IBM has it, the ex-Applix staff are now small cogs in a very large wheel. Those that are not old Applix staff will be even worse to deal with. One of the draw backs of TM1 now being a tool that is part of a broaded set,

Jim.

[rollo19]

Nice bit of journalism Martin on what sounds like a regular Cognos event.

I'll be interested to see how/if they marry TM1 with a Cognos front end.. Contributor? given the architectural differences...

And yes the Innovation centre/blueprints is very handy. Can you upload files on this forum? perhaps we could have a community based innovation centre with TM1 model samples/designs for us newbies.. Financial Consolidations anyone?

[Martin Ryan]

Yep, zip files and the like can be uploaded to the forum. If anybody does get a chance to load up some samples I (or one of the other administrators) will move it to the Useful Code forum.

Martin