TM1 In The News

[Steve Bennett]

Post in this thread anything useful that you read about TM1 in the news.

[Steve Bennett]

IBM Cognos Unveils Revamped TM1 OLAP Stack

TDWI 10/9/2008

By Stephen Swoyer

It's been a long and unusual road for the venerable TM1 OLAP engine, which has twice changed ownership over the last 10 months.

First, in October of 2007, TM1's developer -- the former Applix Inc. -- was acquired by Cognos Inc. Less than two months later, Cognos was itself acquired by IBM Corp. Since then -- and despite promises by both do right by Applix customers and leverage TM1 as the centerpiece of its Cognos Financial Performance Management (FPM) platform -- things went dark on the TM1 front.

Until this week, that is. Today, IBM Cognos announced a new version 9.4 update for TM1, touting the expected performance and usability enhancements, along with new internationalization improvements that, officials argue, stem from Big Blue's stewardship of the Cognos and Applix brands.

TM1 isn't going anywhere, officials say -- although IBM hasn't yet ruled out changing its brand. Moreover, even though IBM Cognos is hard at work incorporating TM1 into its BI and PM products -- a process that involves both integration and reconciliation -- "legacy" Applix customers will still be able to buy the bread-and-butter TM1 OLAP engine, via TM1 MidMarket Edition, which IBM Cognos plans to market to SME types.

"We're offering a dedicated mid-market offering," says Applix veteran Joe Pusztai, now product marketing manager for TM1 with IBM Cognos. "We are very much committed to preserving the ability to use TM1 in a standalone, all-in-one capacity. We're not ever going to make customers buy software that they don't need."

Pusztai hints that the TM1 brand itself might go away: "The TM1 identity might not actually carry forward. We still haven't decided about that, but the actual technology itself … that [is something] we will continue to carry forward" on a standalone basis," he asserts.

TM1 version 9.1 was a relatively mature product when Cognos picked it up last year. Nonetheless, Pusztai says, there's always room for improvement. Enter TM1 9.4, which boasts several improvements, starting with a feature (Active Forms) that smacks of the Dynamic Slices capability which Applix delivered in TM1 9.1.

There's a reason for that, he acknowledges. "That [Dynamic Slices] capability has been enhanced significantly in the 9.4 release under a feature called Active Forms." Pusztai describes Active Forms as "effectively a version 2.0" update for Dynamic Slices, improving upon its predecessor in several respects -- e.g., enabling access via TM1 Web client sessions (Dynamic Slices is Excel-only), supporting formula-based row definitions (Dynamic Slices supports subset-only definitions), using Excel's native formatting metaphors to deliver "much-improved report formatting, and delivering support for server-side zero suppression capabilities.

This last is a big improvement over Dynamic Slices, which first pushed data down to the client before filtering it. This led to considerable bloat, Pusztai maintains. "We would send all of the data down the wire and then the client would filter it, as opposed to what we're doing now, [which is] suppressing it at the server, so that that data never goes down the wire," he explains.

Elsewhere in TM1 9.4, IBM Cognos focused on reconciling the sometimes different experiences of thick and thin client users.

"One of the design goals for the Active Forms feature was that we were getting feature drift between the [TM1] thick and thin clients. There was stuff you could only get in the Web client," Pusztai says. "As of [TM1] 9.4, we've equalized everything. We were able to create a common user experience across both [clients]."

Cognos' purchase of Applix and TM1 raised a few eyebrows. After all, didn't it already offer competitive OLAP technology in the form of Cognos PowerCubes, which are consumed by its market-leading PowerPlay OLAP front-end?

In reality, there wasn't all that much overlap between PowerCubes and TM1. The latter is a high-performance, in-memory OLAP engine that -- much like Oracle/Hyperion's not-in-memory Essbase OLAP engine -- is popular in finance departments. TM1 doesn't have quite the cachet of Essbase. On 32-bit Windows systems, moreover, it used to be bottlenecked by a limited address space (it could address a comparatively tiny 3 GB, with 1 GB reserved for the Windows OS itself). Thanks to the availability of commodity 64-bit hardware from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) -- as well as commodity x64 Windows operating system software -- that constraint has been effectively eliminated. These days, TM1's large in-memory address space and high performance should give it OLAP performance bragging rights, Pusztai contends.

There's also new cross-stack Unicode support -- thanks in no small part to prodding from IBM. "Unicode has a couple of customer-related benefits. For starters, it lets us do all of the Japanese and simplified Chinese, which are going to be localizations that are in the box. That's one of the impacts of IBM -- a much higher focus on globalization and a broader array of tier-one localization support."

Pusztai notes that that giving TM1 a Unicode retrofit should also benefit existing customers, in addition to IBM Cognos users. "We've used Unicode conversion to break some of the internal limits of TM1. It always had a unique capability to store string data as well as numerical data within a cube, but it was limited to 256-byte characters -- an 8-bit feature that was introduced in the product in the 80's," he says. "Thanks to Unicode, that [limitation] is gone."

Right now, IBM plans to continue to support both TM1 for HP-UX and TM1 for Solaris, although Big Blue also expects to deliver an AIX version. That could "force us to reassess our Unix support strategy," Pusztai concedes. Linux support, although not yet promised, is currently under consideration, he indicates. "That [Linux] is an area of strong commitment from IBM."

Joe Furmanek, director of finance with Checkers Drive-In Restaurants Inc., likes what he sees in the new TM1 9.4 feature palette. Active Forms, in particular, should help Checkers reduce much of its administrative overhead.

"It's going to give us some fairly substantial administrative benefits," Furmanek says. "We do use the Excel templates for output to our field managers, and [Active Forms is] going to help us save a lot of time in just purely administrative tasks, [such as] formatting, font changes, things like that, for different sizes of hierarchies."

Checkers is an intriguing TM1 case study: it licensed that product within days of Cognos announcing its plan to acquire Applix. According to Furmanek, Checkers gave "strong consideration" to TM1 on the basis of the Cognos acquisition.

"It fit very well for being a very cost-effective solution. Knowing that Cognos was going to be there, it gave me a little more comfort for down the road," he says.

This underscores a popular IBM/Cognos talking point: namely, that the hyper-fast TM1 engine -- which if anything was held back by its former parent company's lack of prominence -- will be an easier sell with an IBM Cognos brand. "Applix customers always felt that they weren't getting the respect that they deserved -- that they fought tooth and nail to get TM1 installed, often over the objections of IT, which wanted to go with something better known," Pusztai concludes. "So we think that Cognos brand of approval will be very well received."

Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, Ga. You can contact Stephen via e-mail at stephen.swoyer@spinkle.net.

[Steve Bennett]

IAG hits planning limits

By Ry Crozier
9 September 2008

Insurance giant IAG has switched back to TM1 to manage the $7.4 billion in premiums it handles each year.

The company had been using Cognos Enterprise Planning software since 2003, following an earlier switch-out of the Applix TM1 in-RAM online analytical processing server.

Applix TM1 was acquired by Cognos in late 2007. Cognos is now a subsidiary of IBM.

“We acquired CGU [Insurance] around 2003 but found the version of TM1 we were on wasn’t capable of handling the data or numbers of concurrent users we wanted to throw at it,” said Sidney Wong, manager of business intelligence at IAG.

Wong told delegates at the Cognos Forum that IAG ‘had reached the limits’ of what Cognos Enterprise Planning could achieve for the business – particularly when it came to the IAG underwriting model.

“When we first built it, Cognos said it was the largest model they’d seen in Australia,” said Wong.

“We had over 302 million potential data sets. We don’t have a wide dimension set but it goes very deep.

“We had to combine dimensions together into pseudo dimensions just to help us cope with the data size,” Wong explained.

The model size also meant that IAG would typically only run allocations overnight, which were prone to crashes halfway through an up to six-hour process.

This meant that allocations often only ran once a week, which limited business users’ access to data.

“Because we’d reached the limits of Enterprise Planning, it was often the point of failure,” said Wong.

“It was getting to the stage where some people would be asked to sleep in a separate room because the phone rang too often.”

IAG switched out Cognos Enterprise Planning for TM1, following a proof-of-concept phase that also included evaluations of lookSoft and Business Objects.

“We were familiar with TM1 but with the improvements and 64-bit architecture

It was effectively a ‘like-like’ implementation, with IAG replicating ‘whatever we had in Planning across to TM1’, Wong said.

Wong estimates the company used between 100 and 200 consultant days to get the system up and running.

A consultant from partner Cubewise sat with each of IAG’s three developers to ‘mentor’ them in future system development.

The implementation was completed in January of this year.

Wong said that since the TM1 system has been in place, IAG has improved the overnight allocation processing completion rate to above 95 per cent.

In addition, allocations can now all happen daily because they fit into the overnight window.

“We’ve now removed data size as a restriction in planning,” explained Wong.

“We no longer have to think about how big the model is going to be, we can just go ahead and build it.”

This means IAG can now focus on getting more from business models rather than just keeping them going, said Wong.

TM1 has also enabled IAG to downsize the amount of application servers needed to run the processes from 20 to one.

Through load testing, IAG has been able to prove that the TM1 system is capable of supporting 300 concurrent users.

Wong also recommended the use of a proof-of-concept, saying the resource investment paid off in showing TM1 was capable of the complex processing IAG required.

Ry Crozier attended Cognos Forum as a guest of Cognos.

[Jane B]

In-Memory BI Upgrades Point to Mainstream User Adoption

Both the TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrade and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release take first-generation in-memory products to a broader base of users.

By Doug Henschen May 18, 2009 Intelligent Enterprise

New integrations, new scalability options and new data visualization options promise to bring TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 to a broader base of potential business intelligence consumers. Announced and released May 18, the 3.0 launch marks the latest in a series of major upgrades since Spotfire's acquisition by TIBCO nearly two years ago. And like last week's SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release, the upgrade represents the maturation of a once-nichey in-memory product into a mainstream BI offering.

In contrast to conventional BI tools, which query data on disk, in-memory products load data into random access memory (RAM) so users can quickly query and interact with information without extensive IT performance tuning and data preparation. Spotfire was introduced in the late 1990s as a visual data exploration tool used almost entirely by pharmaceutical and life sciences researchers. As has been the case for other in-memory products, Spotfire's power and breadth of appeal have increased with the advent of multi-core, multi-threaded and 64-bit server technologies. Since its acquisition by TIBCO in May 2007, Spotfire has been enhanced with operational and predictive analytics, real-time data integrations and data mining capabilities.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrades announced today include prebuilt data integrations to SAP BW, SAP R/3, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications and Oracle E-Business Suite, in addition to a new Web services integration option. These connectors not only make it easier to integrate popular data sources, they also open up new data access and analysis options.

"Until recently we've been limited to accessing data from relational data sources and file-based locations," admits TIBCO Spotfire product marketing manager Tim Wormus. "With 3.0 we're expanding to full enterprise connectivity, and you can also model the data so you can connect multiple sources to build a federated data warehouse or analytics layer." With Spotfire's caching support, Wormus says you can pull data from production systems and let users query against the caching layer rather than mission-critical production systems.

Designed to support larger, enterprisewide deployments, the scalability features in the 3.0 release include load balancing and failover support as well as new deployment management and administrative controls. The Web-based configuration controls ease remote administration while the deployment management features simplify migration from development, test and production servers.

New analytics and visualizations introduced in TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 include treemaps, new scatterplots and error bars within bar and line charts that let you see the data behind the visualization. An added visualization toolkit is said to make it easier to build custom visualizations. "This extends our lead in our core competency of visually interactive, real-time analytics," Wormus says.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 release comes less than a week after SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a new product that blends the Internet-search-like Polestar query interface with the in-memory analysis capabilities of SAP's Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) appliance. Introduced in 2006 as the Business Intelligence Accelerator, the BWA appliance is another in-memory product headed for mainstream use. The accelerated version of Explorer introduced last week is limited to accessing data in SAP BW, but a "second-wave" upgrade set to be introduced late this year or early next year is expected to access myriad data sources.

QlikTech QlikView and IBM Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix TM1) are two other venerable in-memory products. Several leading BI vendors have either recently added (MicroStrategy) or plan to add (Microsoft) in-memory analysis capabilities. Leading in-memory products and benefits were recently covered in "Insight at the Speed of Thought: Taking Advantage of In-Memory Analytics," an in-depth report available as a free download (registration required) at the Intelligent Enterprise "Next-Era BI Tech Center."

[Jane B]

Animal Health Board Nurtures Financial Planning

Wednesday, 13 May 2009, 11:49 am
Press Release: IBM MEDIA RELEASE

Animal Health Board Nurtures Financial Planning with IBM Cognos Performance Management Solution

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND – 13 May 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that that the Animal Health Board (AHB), has selected IBM Cognos TM1 to streamline the organisation’s financial planning, forecasting and reporting requirements.

The Animal Health Board (AHB) is an incorporated society, legally responsible for managing and implementing the National Pest Management Strategy for bovine tuberculosis in New Zealand. Its powers derive from the Biosecurity Act 1993 and its mission is to eradicate bovine TB from New Zealand. It is accountable to its member organisations and has responsibilities for reporting to the Minister of Agriculture.

AHB selected IBM CognosTM1 following a competitive market review.

“We have become an increasingly decentralised organisation in recent years and our existing package was limited in its capacity to provide our managers with the level of financial detail they require within security constraints. Budgeting and forecasting has become a complex and lengthy exercise with spreadsheets and manual consolidation,” said AHB’s Finance Manager, Joy Tracey.

IBM Cognos TM1 provides a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing large volumes of multidimensional data. Using a patented, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP server, IBM Cognos TM1 provides organisations with a single view of the organisation’s performance.

Once deployed with the assistance of IBM Cognos partner, Cortell, the IBM Cognos TM1 solution will initially be used for AHB’s budgeting and forecasting purposes. It will assist around 40 line managers and central administration staff to generate consolidated cost centre management and financial reports, creating a pool of financial and operational metrics and key performance indicators.

AHB will also deploy IBM Cognos TM1 for performance reporting and scorecarding. This will enable the organisation to integrate and consolidate information from their data sources such as VectorNet, AHB’s award-winning vector monitoring application which helps improve the organisation’s ability to make smarter, faster and more accurate vector control decisions.

The IBM Cognos TM1 solution will also provide the organisation with additional security in enabling only certain members of the organisation to access the general ledger as well as specific data on monthly expenses and year-to-date financial summaries.

“IBM Cognos TM1 will arm us with the flexibility to produce data in the way in which we need the information to be expressed. It will give us a hierarchical way of looking at data as well as being able to readily extract adhoc information to support anaylsis and forecasting solutions. We have complete confidence in Cortell and look forward to having their developers on-site providing skills transfer and management during deployment,” said Tracey.

IBM Cognos TM1 will be fully operational across AHB’s business by 30 June 2009.

For more information about The Animal Health Board, visit: www.ahb.org.nz

For more information on IBM, please visit www.ibm.com

[fgeorge]

Cross posted here is an interesting article about Goodman's recent presentation at the IBM Cognos Forum.

[admin]

The 2010 IBM Business Partner Award Winner: Smart Work
Cortell / Delegat's Wine Estate

By No Byine, Auckland | Thursday, 24 March 2011

Reseller News > The 2010 IBM Business Partner Award Winner: Smart Work

Key business benefits for Delegat’s Wine Estate

Provides hard metrics to support business decisions; specifically enabled the company to run scenarios and understand the impact of strategic decisions; Empowers planners to plan ahead in a 10-year timeframe. from the establishment of an individual vineyard to the sales of a mature bottle of wine in the UK from that vineyard; Preliminary ROI of less than three years; much greater returns anticipated as the system is made more proficient and applications are added; Saves business four to six weeks during each planning cycle; specifically 12 weeks for three to four people per annum.

Technology used:
IBM Cognos TM1 9.4

In this case, Cortell has provided Delegat’s with a solution that doesn’t just solve problems, but enables them to significantly expand its operations with confidence based on hard metrics. Delegat’s can now run scenarios in a 10-year timeframe and accurately predict wine sales in the UK based on vineyards not even planted. In addition, the ROI of less than three years means that its significant investment in technology will pay premiums well into the future. — Raymond Skoglund, channel manager IBM New Zealand

Delegat’s Wine Estate, one of New Zealand's largest family-owned and managed winemakers, was using a comprehensive, but time-consuming planning process based on spreadsheets and manual manipulation. Monthly updates to its general plan were taking weeks to complete, causing bottlenecks and uncertainty in the planning process. In addition, it was proving difficult to manage multiple scenarios.

Delegat’s selected Cortell to implement the IBM Cognos TM1 business intelligence solution to help thecompany with its strategic planning requirements. Delegat's had a suite of complex business rules it had developed over the years, as well as a number of Excel-based reports that managers wanted to retain. In addition, Delegat’s was planning a replacement of its ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution as well so they needed a BI solution that could interface with the new solution as it came on line.

Cortell’s implementation overcame all of the technical hurdles and delivered a solution that ‘changed the business’. Cortell managed to retain almost all of the business rules while preserving the Excel-based reports that management preferred. No data is kept in Excel as data is extracted from the source using ODBC-based (open database connectivity) techniques. This ensures that as Delegat’s changes any data sources the pathways and subsequent analyses will not be affected. As a side-effect of the implementation, Delegat’s was able to eliminate data capture errors and correct omissions in source data.

Delegat’s now has powerful new tools to help it expand overseas and take advantage of opportunities here in New Zealand. For instance, analysts use TM1 to create scenarios for establishing new vineyards, opening new offices and to model product/demand analyses. In addition, they use TM1 to report forecasted results to the stock exchange and look into past results for trends and analysis. Delegat’s can now look at a 10-year planning cycle and run monthly updates to the plan in less than a day. Before TM1 the process would take up to and sometimes more than a month.

Delegat’s now has much more control of its business and can run simulations to predict the effects of any changes to operations. Indeed, it can quantify the results in increased sales by the application of changing the fertilisation application on a specific vineyard. This particular implementation illustrates the benefits from working smarter by using technology. Delegat’s has been able to retain its intellectual property – complex business rules and tried and true reports – while significantly upgrading the back-end processes to deliver those results faster, more accurately and with much more scope.