Another day of breakthrough for the Business Intelligence community. Cognos, the top notch BI vendor, will release its latest version Cognos 8 BI powered with Google's One Box search. This combined effort would ease the process of delivering answers to on commonly asked business metrics.

What could have been reached only by creating a simple list report or by a complex multi-dimensional cube can now be googled. I mean 'Googled'. What a 'wow' factor is ? Imagine if you are the CFO of an enterprise and you would want the average sales of a particular region compared to the last few years. In the present world, a BI developer would essentially create a report/graph and deploy it over the web. The CFO would have to login into the intranet, run that report and wait for the results to come back. Now all that he would do is to type in the search box is Avg Sales - Seattle compare 2002-2005(or something like that). The result would pop up with a google speed. What would rest on the BI developer would be create the report and create appropriate meta tags to reach to this metric. It would create a world of googleable metrics.

I'm excited more than Cognos itself for such a thought hasn't flashed before. Even if it was flashed it wasn't implemented. It looking forward to work on Cognos geared with Google. This would certainly change the way how enterprises look at BI solutions. And that is a great step towards warehousing the world.

P.S - On a seperate note, Why Microsoft and Oracle want to be your one-stop shop for BI. Also, an interesting interview with Sohaib Abbasi, CEO Informatica.