Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Infinium Software recently entered into an OEM arrangement with Cognos to deliver Cognos' business intelligence software, which Infinium will private label and sell to its OS/400 installed base. As part of the agreement, Infinium will gain access to Cognos' online analytical processing (OLAP) technology, as well as a variety of reporting modules, and build the necessary integration to allow them to work with its OS/400-based ERP software.

Infinium announced in late May its partnership with Cognos and its plans to deliver a suite of business intelligence software based on Cognos' Improptu suite, which Infinium calls Infinium Corporate Performance Manager. During the first week of June, Infinium announced the general availability of the first CPM module, called Infinium Financial Manager. Other Infinium private-label CPM modules to follow will include Reporting Manager and Analysis Manager. Infinium is also including Cognos Visualizer and Cognos Upfront in the CPM suite, but is not renaming them as it has the others.

"Corporate performance management" is the latest industry buzzword for business intelligence solutions. "CPM is an integral concept [as it] represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence solutions," said Lee Geishecker, a research director at Gartner, in the Infinium press release announcing its CPM solution. "We believe ERP vendors are among those well positioned to successfully deliver CPM solutions to their customers."

The core of the Infinium CPM and Cognos Impromptu suites is Cognos PowerPlay, which forms the basis for the Analysis Manager component of Infinium's CPM suite. The Financial Manager and Reporting Manager components of Infinium's CPM suite are Windows- and Web-based clients that feature prebuilt hooks to use the OLAP capabilities of Analysis Manager. Those two components also include a number of canned templates designed to get users of Infinium's CRM, Human Resources and Payroll, Process Manufacturing, Materials Management, and Financial Management ERP applications up and running quickly. (Financial Management is part of Infinium's core ERP suite and is not to be confused with the just-announced Financial Manager component of CPM.)

Infinium's Analysis Manager (powered by Cognos PowerPlay) is where users access stores of data and load them into multidimensional databases. PowerPlay consists of two main parts: the PowerPlay Application Server, where users create a multidimensional database (or, in Cognos' lingo, "PowerCubes"), and the PowerPlay Transformer, which allows users to reuse existing multidimensional databases created with Hyperion Solutions' Essbase, IBM's DB2 OLAP Server, Microsoft's OLAP Services, or SAP's BW, and to load data housed in relational database management systems and other data stores into the PowerCube. The PowerPlay Application Server runs on Windows, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX platforms, while PowerPlay Transformer runs on all those platforms, plus Compaq's (now Hewlett-Packard's) Tru64 Unix.

Analysis Manager ships with prepackaged analysis cubes for almost all of Infinium's ERP suite, including the Human Resources and Payroll, Materials Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Financial Management applications. The prebuilt analysis cubes for Financial Management include a general ledger income statement cube, an accounts receivable cube, and a payables ledger vendor payment cube. The cubes for Infinium's Human Resources and Payroll applications include an HR cube, an HR training cube, a short-term-hire cube for HR, and an actual labor cost cube. There is a single purchase management cube, designed for the Materials Management application, and a marketing campaign analysis cube for Infinium CRM. Infinium does not list any prebuilt cubes for its Process Manufacturing system, although the Reporting Manager does include prebuilt report templates for Process Manufacturing.

Infinium Financial Manager is closely integrated with Infinium's General Ledger and Payroll applications, and provides more than 80 prebuilt reports that assist executives with their planning, budgeting, forecasting, and information consolidation activities. Specifically, its planning capabilities allow financial professionals to develop and view predictive models that take into account cash flows, balance sheets, and profit and loss statements; extend the planning process across the organization; and analyze data and change model parameters in any way, using top-down or back-solve analysis, Infinium says. Its budgeting capabilities allow users to slice and dice budget information in a number of ways--by date, region, product, or customer; they provide various starting points for developing a budget; and they allow users to share that information and discuss it with others over the Web. The forecasting features of Financial Manager let users continually monitor financial changes and create annual and rolling forecasts, perform what-if analysis, and gain insight into the links between revenue, expenses, and investments.

Lastly, the Reporting Manager component of Infinium's CPM suite allows users to use the Web to distribute a number of pre-canned reports for the range of Infinium ERP applications, as well as link directly into ad hoc query mechanisms to get up-to-the-minute changes made to the multidimensional database. The Reporting Manager also gives users the capability to make changes to their report, create new reports with a wizard, and output the information in PDF and Microsoft Excel formats.

Infinium is supporting its new CPM suite with its in-house service professionals. For more information about CPM, visit Infinium's eLibrary.