Where to now for Cognos Planning?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… a product called Adaytum was successfully developed and launched, this product was and still is the mainstay for many planning and budgeting applications throughout the world. The adaytum analyst component was so popular with the masses that in 2003 a company called Cognos decided to acquire the brand and its customers. Cognos decided the Analyst component was such a good application builder that there was no need to continue to develop this part of the tool and began to focus its efforts on a separate web based client install interface called Contributor. Roll forward four years to the year of 2007 and Cognos now decides to purchase a competitor company by the name of Applix, rebranding its flagship planning product TM1 to...um.. Cognos TM1. Soon after Cognos went on to sell itself to the giant IBM, so start adding IBM to all the Cognos product names from now on... hope I haven't confused?

In summary, IBM found itself in possession of two historically popular planning tools Cognos TM1 and Cognos Enterprise Planning (EP).  Previously they both competed under the same umbrella of “budgeting and forecasting” but now were best of buddies and full of praise about each other's strengths, and how they complement each other.

Cognos Planning had the 'front end', but TM1 had the 'back end', and over the next five years the IBM R&D team took a step back, tweaked, tested, analysed, took another step back and then attempted to retro fit the 'good pieces' into their chosen leader brand. Carefully keeping the customers and partners in the dark for most of this period.

Even though IBM would find it hard to admit to this, it is now apparent that Cognos Planning will be slowly but surely be phased out. This may take five, even ten years of routine upgrades and patches before it is finally announced but it does seem the writing is on the wall. Any current EP user that has been working with the product for a long while would admit not many changes have occurred with the Analyst component in the last ten years, and any advances in Contributor are only long overdue performance modifications.  

If you’re an existing Cognos Planning user and you are taking the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, we understand Planning was a good product and that it will continue to be supported by IBM but with a limited development programme based only on bug fixes and hardware upgrades. We recommend that when the next model requirements occur, or your existing models start to become dated and unmanageable, that you take a look at the Anaplan platform.  You may find Anaplan will offer benefits or functionality that makes migrating over an attractive proposition.