Zambonini relates tool tales at Cognos

Software Cognos president and CEO talks to Jose Delameilleure.

Ron Zambonini became president of Cognos in 1993, in a transitory period when the company was transferring from development tools to decision support systems. He was promoted to CEO two years later.

You set out to change Cognos from an R&D-driven company into a marketing-driven one. Have you achieved that goal yet?

What we are trying to do is to make Cognos more customer-driven and we are about halfway there. My background was in products and when I talk to customers I still talk about the technology first, but I'm beginning to change. In the next three years, Cognos will become more of a systems company, working a lot more with partners in the future.

What has been the major change in the company in the 10 years since you joined as director of R&D?

Last year, we made 80 per cent of our revenue out of business intelligence and only 20 per cent out of application development tools. That's a huge change. It has also changed the profile of our customers. With Powerhouse, we dealt mainly with medium-sized companies or divisions of large companies.

Business intelligence has brought us into the Fortune 1,000 companies.

Cognos came of age with development tools. But revenue from Powerhouse and Axiant is declining and you axed the Realobjects project. Are you a business intelligence company only?

We expected application development tools to decline by 15 per cent last year, but they declined by 10 per cent - $60 million is still a very big business. It's hard to project what is going to happen, but a number of companies are saying 'let's stick with this application until after the year 2000'. There's still a lot of business coming from millennium-compliant versions of Powerhouse and Axiant. I told customers we are going to support Powerhouse for the next 200 years.

We failed with Realobjects because of the big changes around. The Web was coming up and we felt it was best to leave that to other companies.

But the technology is going to be seen in a new product that we will launch for metadata. Its codename is Comet, from 'common metadata' and we will launch it at the end of the year. The idea of Comet is to have a model of your business and prepare the data model, and from that do things like creating catalogues for your query tool and multi-dimensional hierarchies for your multi-dimensional tools. In general, the idea was to create a very simple model of business intelligence and the way business intelligence flows in your operation.

There's going to be a consolidation in the business intelligence market.

Do you intend to acquire? Can Cognos resist a takeover bid?

My job as CEO is to give my shareholders value. We are at the forefront of the business intelligence market. Business Objects is two-thirds of our size and by the end of the year we will be twice as big as it is in the business intelligence market. But we don't need to be an acquirer.

What will happen is that small companies will continue to disappear. We have $125 million in the bank. We will be acquiring technology, not revenue.

For other products, we have obtained exclusive rights and we also OEM other products. You will see a lot more of that. As far as being acquired, we are an expensive company - our market capitalisation is $1.2 billion.

But I'm open to offers. We're a public company and people can buy our shares.

Are ERP and business intelligence getting closer?

I think the big ERP companies are beginning to get through their installations and this has created a wealth of data for use in datamarts. I see a tremendous opportunity there for Cognos and we are investing heavily in our SAP Accelerator product. The pipeline for this product is strong. We believe it's a good thing to have an independent business intelligence company like us, because most of the large companies have more than one source of data for their datamarts.

What products can we expect from Cognos before 2000?

The next product, that will be shipping, in August or September, is Impromptu Web Reports. You create standard reports with Impromptu 5 and run them from the Web. On the Powerplay side, there's Powerplay 6, which just went into beta. Internally we call it the Dominator. It has close to 200 man-years of work in it and it's the premier Powerplay version. It increases volumes, decreases load times substantially and gives a tenfold improvement in relational data load times.

There's also a product called Infoguide. When you log on to your system, it will give you reports that are of interest to you. And your Cognos front page will be different from the one your neighbour is getting. In its final release, it will probably be called Cognos Web Reports and will incorporate all our tools. But in its first release it will be inside Impromptu Web Reports and called Info Guide.

Can we expect new partnerships in the quarters to come?

Thirty per cent of our revenue comes through the channel and I want to increase it to 50 per cent. People don't necessarily want to buy from a vendor, they may want packaged products. We have deals like that with NCR, IBM and other data warehouse vendors. About 100 companies that OEM our products. We have built a reseller business in the US and want to build it up around the world.