In our never-ending quest to provide best-in-class managed business analytics to their diverse portfolio of customers, Ironside is pleased to announce we have entered into a new strategic partnership with SoftLayer (An IBM Company). Ironside is one of the world’s only managed services providers that exclusively specializes in the hosting and cloud deployment of managed IBM Business Analytics and Information Management solutions. Widely regarded as the foremost IBM Business Analytics and Information Management platform experts, Ironside brings decades of combined implementation and platform management experience and expertise that our consulting customers have enjoyed since 1999. Read more
In June 2013, IBM introduced its rapidly adaptive visualization engine (RAVE) as part of IBM Cognos 10.2.1. This highly evolved engine raises the visualization standard within the business analytics landscape, and can be fully customized to fit any specific business requirements.
RAVE or Extensible Visualizations are far more advanced than what we are accustomed to. They are interactive, animated and are available in more variety, including heat maps, spider maps, tag clouds, bubble charts etc. Read more
On September 10th, IBM announced the release of Cognos TM1 10.2. This release contains a substantial amount of enhancements and bug fixes, which further integrate Cognos TM1 with Cognos Business Intelligence and provide better performance when planning and forecasting. One major focus area was enhancing IBM Cognos TM1 10.2 Performance Modeler. Read more
Today’s big data challenges for both transactions and analytics are increasing demands on data systems. Traditional data warehouses sometimes struggle as they are often NOT designed to meet the demands of advanced analytics on big data. That’s where solutions like Netezza come in.
IBM PureData for Analytics (formerly Netezza) is a data warehouse appliance that has a purpose-built analytics engine and an integrated database, server, and storage. With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning, and minimal ongoing maintenance, the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest total cost of-ownership. Read more
Earlier this week (and without much fanfare) an incremental, but none the less exciting update to Cognos BI was released. Cognos 10.2.1 FP1 (Fixpack 1), also known as Cognos 10.2.1.1, includes a number of new features that build on the June’s impressive release, especially in the area of extensible visualizations or RAVE. Read more
Difficulty: Easy
Required Ingredients: Prompt macros and static values within a prompt parameter.
Scenario:
You have some existing reports that prompt on Year and Month.
Users would like a better experience by having default selections provided for them. For scheduling purposes you’d also like to set relative time so the report can run based on current month and current year. You can accomplish this using macros. Read more
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform has built-in monitoring systems that gather different metrics on each service, dispatcher, server and server group. These system metrics provide better insight into the status and overall health of a Cognos BI environment. The performance of these system metrics play a key role in tuning a BI environment to its full potential. Read more
Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat” describes how outsourcing, technology, and other factors helped level the business playing field around the globe. What if traditional barriers to entry for using big data and business analytics were removed? Would small to mid-sized businesses be able to compete more effectively with larger organizations? IBM has made it possible to answer these questions and many more for its customers who leverage IBM Analytic Answers. Read more
Difficulty: Easy
Required Ingredients: Report Studio, List Object, PDF Viewer
Scenario:
A report that you expected to be viewed exclusively in HTML will need to be printed. In order to do this, you switch the output to PDF to create a printable report and find that the columns span across multiple pages, making the report more difficult to understand.
You’ll need to make some minor modifications in order for the printable report to remain effective. Read more
Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) is the technology behind IBM’s extensible visualization offering. With the ability to create your own visualizations and to utilize those that others have created, the bounds of what have historically been accepted as the limits of IBM Cognos charts and graphs are gone. Read more
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.