Joel Vander Weele wrote this in the late evening:
Greetings from the pool deck of the Renaissance Hotel, in beautiful, sunny, and hot, Las Vegas.
I will be here for the next few days, attending Cognos Partner Summit and Cognos Customer Forum which are the two largest external events Cognos holds during the year. In the fall, there usually are product launches, which are done in a roadshow format.
The Cognos events are being held in the Venetian.
The first day of the Partner Summit was today. The content so far has been as expected, with the typical product orientated tracks, OEM track (those vendors who wrap Cognos into their own software products), and selling tracks.
This is the 3rd Partner orientated event I have attended in the last 9 months, and so far the content has been fairly similar. It is fair to say that Cognos needs a large and growing network of professionals (Cognos likes the word Ecosystem) to help make its customers successful. Cognos has made strides in the last few years to embrace the partner network. It seems clear to me from recent interactions with Cognos that this message is reaching the field team.
Probably the most interesting thing I heard today relates to the size of the CPM marketplace. IDC reports that taken together, Business Intelligence and Financial applications is approximately an $8.9 Billion industry, with an annual growth rate of over 10.5%. Moreover, these growth rates are expected to continue for the next 3 years.
Of course, a CPM practitioner knows that a metric taken out of context means very little. The usefulness this measure depends on how the marketplace is defined and how timely the information is.
In other news, Cognos ran a number of surveys and studies about CPM. It appears that bits and pieces of it will be released this week. From what I have heard so far, the results will be interesting. Stay tuned!
Filed under: Uncategorized, Cognos Software