Question about PowerPlay and MS Analysis Services

Our company may select Cognos as the vendor to provide our BI OLAP layer. Even independent Cognos consultant/guru William E. Pearson III indicates that even Cognos recognizes the strong need for PowerPlay users to have active connectivity to MS Analysis cubes in the following article: <url>http://2000trainers.com/article.aspx?articleID=270&page=1</url

Mr. Pearson didn't go into the specifics about why Cognos BI users may want to leverage their MOLAP needs by adding MS Analysis Services into the mix, even if PowerPlay is the tool of choice for the cubing component. I need some very strong reasons for this for why we should pay the licensing and add MS Analysis Services, even after we purchase PowerPlay (if Cognos wins the bid.

Does anyone know or would be willing to speculate on these reasons that Mr. Pearson was hinting about? I also certainly want to hear Microsoft's take on this.

If you choose Cognos as OLAP server you will be locked in to their solutions
on the client side as well. Cognos do not provide a relational database so
you will have to buy that from another supplier.

With SQL Server you will get the OLAP-server(Analysis Services), the new
reportserver(Reporting Services), the relational database and an ETL-tool
included in the license.

HTH
/Thomas Ivarsson BI Consultant Malmö Sweden

"Caretaker (AT) ins-lua (DOT) com" <anonymous (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:CABFB7B2-226B-428F-97C8-EB8C916251C8 (AT) microsoft (DOT) com...
that even Cognos recognizes the strong need for PowerPlay users to have
active connectivity to MS Analysis cubes in the following article:
<url>http://2000trainers.com/article.aspx?articleID=270&page=1</url>
mix, even if PowerPlay is the tool of choice for the cubing component. I
need some very strong reasons for this for why we should pay the licensing
and add MS Analysis Services, even after we purchase PowerPlay (if Cognos
wins the bid.)
take on this.

I think you should go to a Cognos discussion group to get an answere for
that question.
/Thomas Ivarsson

"Caretaker (AT) ins-lua (DOT) com" <anonymous (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:48F0C3B3-1BBC-41E0-B9E1-820058CD1123 (AT) microsoft (DOT) com...
using Cognos client side, including both ReportNet tools as well as
PowerPlay to read FROM MS Analysis generated cubes. This is what the Cognos
specialist/author was alluding to, though I'm trying to get more details of
the specific benefits from this added flexibility. In other words, what was
the specific reasons from an industry demand standpoint that required Cognos
to add connectivity from its client side tools to read from MS cubes?

- Deepak

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This earlier thread on the newsgroup may be of interest:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...8&th=e86dbef4b
45a09b8&rnum=10
Subject: Re: (AS+Panorama) vs (AS+Proclarity) vs MicroStrategy vs Cognos
View: Complete Thread (7 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap
Date: 2003-08-06 13:41:48 PST
...
Based on your answers, Analysis Services with either ProClarity or
NovaView
sounds like an appropriate choice, especially if you are already
committed
to SQL Server 2000. It can handle your data volumes without problems,
supports local cubes (unlike MicroStrategy), is faster than PowerPlay or
MicroStrategy and costs will be much lower. It also supports write-back,
unlike MicroStrategy or PowerPlay (though Cognos has other financial
tools
that do provide write-back). Cube building in Analysis Services is easy
enough and usually takes less effort than preparing the data in the star
or
snowflake schema. The security system is functional, but can cause
performance problems if you have a large number of roles to manage.
...
- Deepak

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Hi,

Our experience with Cognos compared with Panorama Novaview based on MS
AS2000 is the fast performance, features and price difference in
advance of Panorama NovaView. You can see the performance and features
over internet by yourself on one of our customer production websites
in Europe. A price quote can be asked by mail.

Regards,
Marco
www.gmsbv.nl

Caretaker (AT) ins-lua (DOT) com <anonymous (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote