Deploy Cognos in Minutes with New BI Pattern, IBM Says

December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Critics have long derided the long deployment times typically required by big business intelligence offerings such as IBM‘s Cognos. However, with last week’s launch of Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0, IBM says it has cut the deployment of a full, fault-tolerant Cognos environment to a matter of minutes.

Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0 is a new piece of software designed to speed up the deployment of Cognos business intelligence applications on IBM’s new PureApplication server platform. PureApplication servers, you will remember, are all-in-one systems that don’t run applications so much as they run “patterns of expertise.”

That concept-bending scheme is on full display with Business Intelligence Pattern version 1.0, which IBM promises will deliver a full Cognos BI environment, without all the configuring, tuning, blood, sweat, and tears that would typically go into it.

With the BI Pattern 1.0, “your BI deployments can be up and running in minutes in an optimized fault-tolerant environment with elastic scaling and load balancing…” IBM says. It’s a fact that it will take you more time to read the About IBM Business Intelligence Pattern section on the IBM Information Center website than it will for you to deploy Cognos on your PureApplication server.

With that kind of capability in version 1.0, it’s tough to see what IBM could follow it up with in version 2.0 (perhaps BI deployments cut to seconds?) Actually, IBM says that this release supports Cognos version 10.1.1, while a future release of the BI Pattern will support Cognos version 10.2.

For more information on the BI Pattern, see IBM United States Software Announcement 212-080 (pdf).