Intelligent Enterprise

The Cognos 8 Go! Mobile solution started shipping in February, but the business intelligence vendor chose this week's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Fla., as a coming-out party of sorts for a technology it announced last year.

Designed to deliver reports and up-to-date information from the Cognos 8 platform, Go! Mobile works exclusively with devices from Research In Motion (RIM). The purpose-built connection to RIM's Blackberry devices is said to offer two advantages. First, reports only have to be designed once in order to deliver them to desktops as well as mobile devices; Go! Mobile takes care of report formatting steps. Second, Cognos asserts Go! Mobile takes better advantage of the native navigational features of RIM devices than competitive offerings that use J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition).

Highlighting the value of access to intelligence on the go, Cognos announced today that customer CRC Health Corp., a behavioral healthcare company, is using Cognos 8 Go! Mobile to deliver up-to-date information to clinicians, clinical managers and others employees traveling among the firm's 130 locations nationwide.

"We needed a solution on a single platform that would integrate traditional BI reports with current, up-to-date client status indicators or other key snippets of actionable information," stated Jay Ramiodi, vice president and CTO. "Consequently, staff who are highly involved in clinical decision-making can proactively respond and immediately take or recommend appropriate preventative action."

Last week, Cognos rival Business Objects released a new mobile offering that uses J2ME to integrate with BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and other mobile platforms. A Business Objects spokesperson countered that J2ME can support device-native navigation features and added that the solution offers write-back capability that lets you update information in the BI platform from the mobile device " a capability not supported by the view-only Go! Mobile solution.

To ensure data security, Go! Mobile uses both encryption and "lease key" technology. The former protects data in transit while the latter prevents access in the event a device is lost or stolen. RIM administration tools also include a feature that lets you remotely clear the memory of specific devices in the field.

Go! Mobile is an optional add-on to the Cognos 8 platform. Pricing was not disclosed.