Let’s talk about two of my favorite pieces of technology – Cognos BI and Salesforce.com and the Salesforce Integration with Cognos. Users of Cognos BI and Salesforce have run into integration issues based on an on-demand model for data access over the internet and dealing with communication issues. The salesforce.com data interface requires an adaptor providing security and business naming. Additional issues that come into play are accessing hosted and on premise data, hard to extend reports beyond simple lists, limited historical trend reporting, and users who often extract data into spreadsheets and distribute. When it comes to historical trend reporting, the capability exists to expand pipeline this month versus pipeline last month and see what’s changed?

A key strength of IBM Cognos 10 is data access and integration. The strong integration is environment based on integration kits and a software development kit. IBM has been working with Salesforce.com for some time, primarily because of Salesforce.com’s history of delivering successful projects. IBM and Salesforce have developed best practices based on knowledge of the environment and known deployment strategies.  Also, IBM has a very strong capability from data integration right through to portal deployment.

Stemming from this, we’re now able to integrate with just an ODBC connection.  We can integrate even within the SFDC portal as you can also do with Cognos BI.

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