Cognos Unveils KM Product for Extranets
Electronic commerce meets knowledge management with a new product offering from Cognos (Burlington, MA). DataMerchant Version 1.0 packages, distributes and merchandises relational data over the Internet, extranets or intranets.Designed for corporations who generate valuable data as a primary business function, and sell that information to business partners, DataMerchant provides tools for building and maintaining online data distribution and merchandising applications. "Business Intelligence has traditionally been inward looking, providing critical business information to internal knowledge workers," saidGraham Mackintosh, director of DataMerchant. "DataMerchant introduces a new focus, allowing corporations to provide business intelligence data to partners and customers." DataMerchant is currently being used by Conway, Arkansas-based Acxiom to deliver demographic information products to the global marketplace using the Internet, helping to "drastically reduce our time to market for new information products and implement a strategy to carry our existing products forward," said Mark Theilken of Axciom's Data Products Division. "DataMerchant offers a solution to the vexing problem of how to securely sell structured information via the Web," added Wayne Eckerson, director of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for Patricia Seybold Group's (Boston). DataMerchant Version 1.0 for Windows NT, which supports Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA), Sybase (Emeryville, CA), Microsoft (Redmond, WA) SQL and most other databases, is available for $65,000 per server.