Netezza on cloudIronside is excited to announce a ground breaking new solution for organizations wanting to leverage their analytics workload-optimized PureData for Analytics / Netezza appliance in conjunction with rest of their virtualized private cloud analytics architecture. Ironside’s IBM PureData for Analytics (PDA) for Cloud offering solves all of the major hurdles for connecting your physical big data appliance with your virtual cloud infrastructure: management and communications bandwidth and latency. Ironside is now uniquely able to provide hosting and management of your appliance in conjunction with direct, private, and secure network connectivity back to IBM SoftLayer or other major cloud providers. This means you can host your entire analytics architecture in the cloud and still take advantage of the massive benefits that a physical appliance provides in this application. Read more

To learn more about Cognos Analytics, the next-generation Cognos platform that IBM announced at Insight 2015, please check out our article on the product’s top 4 release features.

Update, October 6, 2015: Cognos 10.2.2 has been around for almost a year now, and we’ve had a lot of time to dig deeper into the features we discussed originally in this article. To keep you informed on what we’ve found out, this post’s original author Crystal Meyers has gone back and added new reflections and insights she’s gained while working with 10.2.2 in the field. Check out her new thoughts in italics below. Read more

Hospital readmissions are estimated to cost over $41 billion annually. Readmissions, specifically when patients are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, are quality metrics that hospitals watch closely. Healthcare organizations seek to understand what conditions are bringing patients back to the hospital. Many readmissions could be prevented if hospitals can identify the factors that indicate readmission in the patient population. Read more

Workforce Planning

On October 21st, Ironside hosted Robust Workforce Planning Enablement with IBM Cognos TM1 Webinar, where Ironside’s TM1  experts discussed the challenges and options for cube design and conducted a live demonstration of Ironside’s TM1 workforce planning solution.

Ironside’s planning solutions offer greater capabilities and flexibility than packaged cloud solutions or when compared against other enterprise planning offerings. Read more

Synopsis

This article covers how to allow access to a report with a password challenge prompt, creating a password protected report.

Overview

Security in Cognos is extremely robust, letting you permit or deny access to data elements on a package, data source, or even row level in a Database. Normally, standard group permissions conveniently control report execution access for most situations, but certain business applications may require a select subset of users to run a report who may not all be in the same group. In lieu of adding a separate group and assigning those users to it, a report can start with a prompt page with a password challenge response that allows only users with a valid password to run the report. Read more

Synopsis

How to create, implement and use conditional blocks in Cognos reports.

Overview

Conditional blocks show different display results based on user interaction or parameters read in when a report is run. They provide a creative method for presenting either the same report data in various formats or executing several completely different reports from one prompt page. Read more

Employee compensation accounts for most of the expense base for service-oriented companies. The true ‘driver’ for this expense revolves around workforce planning. Creating a projection that matches the size of the workforce to the demands of the business can be a difficult exercise. Like most complex tasks, breaking it down into manageable components makes it easier to implement. This is the core principle behind driver-based compensation planning. Read more

There is a plethora of content available on utilizing the various TM1 functions, but what happens when these functions do not work as expected? What do you do when a rule does not return the expected value, a TI process does not load the values you had hoped for, or a cube’s performance is below acceptable levels? This article will cover some techniques for debugging TM1 that you can use to resolve issues with rules, TI processes, and cube performance. Read more

Why do I Care? It’s a simple question that is crucial to whether or not your idea sells, but it is frequently overlooked. Professional salesperson or not, we all have a degree of selling in our lives whether it’s convincing the kids to run errands with you or convincing a client to adopt one of your ideas. Read more

Ironside is excited to announce the launch of one of our most innovative and dynamic courses to date: Applying Visualizations in Cognos. Demonstrating our continued commitment to remaining at the forefront of business analytics education, this two-day course will help you unlock the true potential of your organization’s mission-critical data by showing you how to craft it into highly impactful, highly consumable visual formats using the IBM Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). Read more