It's been almost 2 years since I wrote an article about how IBM planned to take advantage of TM1 OLAP Server which it acquired as part of the Cognos acquisition.  The article "TM1 Olap Gets its Day in the Sun " outlined how TM1 would be a strategic cog in the IBM Cognos BI and Performance Management strategy.  So I decided to take a look back at that article which I wrote when I was at AMR Research (now part of Gartner) and see just how well IBM Cognos had executed on that strategy.


Below are some excepts from the article outlining the roadmap IBM Cognos laid out for analysts at the time:

 

1.  TM1 will become the underlying engine for Cognos Planning over time.

 

 

2. TM1 will provide analytics and reporting against transaction-level data from general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable systems. The intent is to expand this to include other transaction level analysis of sales, inventory, and procurement over time.

 

3.  Cognos will combine the TM1 engine, some prepackaged Cognos 8 Reports, and Applix’s Executive Viewer (acquired in 2006), with its target set on midmarket companies looking for a combined reporting, analysis, and planning product. The first release will provide Excel-based planning and analytics via Executive Viewer, with following releases adding reporting and additional planning capabilities.

4.  TM1 will be a native data source for Cognos 8 BI instead of integrated so that it can take advantage of services such as query, scheduling, presentation, and others without any data latency that often occurs when integrating a non-native data source.

 

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Now, two years later, let's grade how they executed on the roadmap for TM1

1. Planning Engine - Grade=B+  TM1 is now the underlying technology for planning for new customers.  Enhancements such as personal hierarchies and scenarios address some of TM1's the previous shortcomings as a planning engine.  Planning down to the SKU level, which was challenging in Cognos Planning works much better in TM1.  Managed contribution on TM1 includes much of the workflow functionality that Cognos Enterprise Planning clients have come to know and love.  The migration path for legacy Cognos Planning clients is not seamless but IBM Cognos is not forcing a migration for those clients not yet ready to migrate.  There will be a cost to migrate to TM1 server but clients will receive full credit for existing contributor licenses.

2. Transaction Analytics - Grade=B   TM1 has long had a strength in financial analysis because of its in-memory architecture.  Improvements in administration and resource allocation have improved performance and concurrency allowing TM1 to be an analytic engine for transation-level data stored in EDWs and load data from transaction systems into TM1 in near real-time.  However, query performance may not be as strong as other read-only, preaggregated solutions.

3. Mid-Market Planning & Analysis - Grade=A  IBM Cognos Express is doing very well in the mid-market as a combined planning, analysis and reporting product.  They have done a very good job of packaging up functionality from many assets into an "IT-lite" but comprehensive mid-market offering and are making a big splash with it in the market place. 

4. Native to Cognos 8 BI - Grade=B+   Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting or other PM applications, developed in TM1, can be accessed from within the BI portal and the BI components can access the TM1 data in real-time.  Framework Manager integration enables consumption of TM1 cube data via IBM Cognos 8 BI. 

There are still enhancements to be made to TM1 planning  in order to lure legacy Cognos Enterprise Planning clients over to TM1 but a lot of progress has been made.  Cognos Controller will remain on its existing relational technology with TM1 "ebedded" for analysis which makes sense but does not unify their PM products on the TM1 engine.

Overall, I give IBM an A-/B+ in meeting their roadmap for TM1 since the acquisition of Cognos.  Former Applix clients that came over to IBM with the acquistion (who are borderline "cult-ish" about TM1) should be happy with the attention their product has gotten from Big Blue.