Cognos and IBM today announced an expansion of their relationship to help customers integrate their business processes across the enterprise and gain greater insight into business performance. The new Strategic Alliance agreement includes joint development, marketing, and sales of SOA-based solutions to help customers optimize their analytics capabilities leveraging industry-specific best practices. As part of the agreement, IBM will increase its Cognos consultant capabilities to support the activities and solutions described in this announcement. Cognos will further enhance and optimize its business intelligence products for IBM hardware, software, and services. Cognos will also deliver IBM's WebSphere and Information Management technologies as part of the preferred reference architecture for Cognos 8 Special Edition, a complete BI solution covering reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboarding, and event management. Open Standards Through SOA IDC predicts the market opportunity for SOA, including software, services, and hardware, will reach $21 billion by 2007. Both IBM and Cognos fully embrace and support SOA to deliver open-standards business applications to any number of users regardless of their existing technology infrastructure. As a result, customers have the opportunity to easily overcome one of the key challenges of implementing an SOA infrastructure: managing, integrating, and unlocking value from their business information -- an organization's most valuable asset. Today's announcement represents a significant commitment to providing clients with open standards-based business solutions that will allow them to leverage their existing IT assets, lower costs, and provide flexibility regarding their choice of operating environments, including Linux. Building on its existing successful relationship, the strategic alliance tightens the integration between Cognos and IBM across all areas of the organizations including software, hardware, services, marketing, and joint product development. "We've had great success working with Cognos and IBM," said Chris Framel, applications group manager, City of Albuquerque, New Mexico. "Cognos gives us powerful new tools to help us keep our municipal departments and residents informed on public safety and operational issues through our 24/7 extranet. Its open, distributed architecture works seamlessly on our existing IBM technology infrastructure and as a result, we can ensure residents and employees find consistent and helpful information to help keep the city running smoothly and more efficiently." Joint Development and Solutions Cognos and IBM will develop and market new vertical offerings to help customers address their business challenges across industries including Insurance and Public Sector. IBM and Cognos will help customers in these industries deploy SOA-based solutions, providing them with the flexibility they need to easily integrate information with third-party applications regardless of the underlying technology. IBM and Cognos will also continue to optimize solution performance on IBM's complete middleware set of offerings, including WebSphere, Information Management, Lotus, Tivoli, and Rational, and its hardware including IBM's eServer xSeries and pSeries platforms supporting Linux, AIX, or Windows environments, as well as IBM's eServer iSeries and zSeries platforms for data integration. The result for customers will be enterprise-class security, performance, and scalability at an affordable price. "We're happy to extend our strategic alliance with IBM to drive innovation in the marketplace for our joint customers," said Rob Ashe, president and chief executive officer, Cognos. "Both companies share a vision for providing cost effective, integrated business solutions for enterprise companies. With this alliance, our organizations will be more tightly aligned and in an optimal position to help our customers succeed with their BI and performance management initiatives." "Today's announcement further illustrates IBM's commitment to helping our clients deliver innovative solutions that solve their industry-specific business challenges. Combining Cognos' industry-leading applications with IBM's open technology and services expertise, will help organizations increase efficiencies and gain a faster return on their investment," said Mark Hanny, vice president, Strategic Alliances, IBM. "As a result, our joint customers will be better able to respond to customers, business partners, and employees with information that leads to better decision making, higher sales, and enhanced customer loyalty."