Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) announced that the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) has standardized on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) for a more unified and complete view of organizational performance.
The first securities exchange in the U.S., and founded in 1790, the PHLX has a strong tradition of innovation and continues to respond to the ever-changing needs of the investment community. The company was looking for a more comprehensive reporting system to allow it to better manage membership data. Prior to using Cognos software, the PHLX had data stored in separate remote groups. After a competitive review, the PHLX chose Cognos 8 BI as its standard reporting system to gain one unified and interactive view of information from its diverse set of management applications and isolated data silos. Cognos 8 BI will enable prompted and ad-hoc reporting to help centralize diverse and redundant applications, as well as ensure reliable information sharing.
With a central reporting system and a common front end, employees will be able to select from a list of commonly used reports or create ad hoc reports to get answers to questions and find new information. The PHLX will use IBM’s WebSphere portal as the interface and access point for Cognos 8 BI. The software’s ease of use will enable all Exchange employees to use Cognos 8 BI to view membership data, keep track of new and old account information, and gain information about new products, options, equities, real-time trade report data, and clearing and exchange billing. In addition, Cognos 8 BI will automatically deliver daily, monthly and quarterly reports on billing and trading activities. These reporting activities will provide employees with easier access to information they need to make better business decisions.
“With the legacy mainframe and data islands, we could only view data in isolated chunks,” said Doug Schafer, first vice president of derivatives trading systems development and back office redesign, the Philadelphia Stock
Exchange. “Standardizing on Cognos 8 BI provides us with a better look at the company in order to deliver critical business insights and drive improved decision-making. While it is a more comprehensive system, it is still easy for
our non-technical employees to use regularly.”
Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into the PHLX’s existing AIX and DB2 infrastructures, with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management.
“The Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s standardization on Cognos 8 BI is demonstrative of our competitive edge in the business intelligence market, and the financial services industry,” said Laurence Trigwell, senior financial services industry director, Cognos. “Our enterprise-wide solution is the only solution on a single Web services architecture that will help businesses gain better insights for their organization by putting the information into the hands of decision makers. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange now has an easy to use, reliable system with flexible report generation and quality data integrity.”
Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the financial services industry. More than 1,000 financial services institutions worldwide use Cognos, including nine of the top 10 banks in Europe and all of the top 10 banks in the United States. Customers include Regions Financial, Bank of Ireland, First Citizens Bank and SWIFT, the financial industry-owned co-operative servicing over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.