The company announced the upcoming release of ReportNet during its first-quarter earnings call last June but is expected to launch the product in New York this week.

ReportNet combines features that until now were found separately in several Cognos offerings, integrators said. In the upcoming product, those features are integrated and built on top of a new Web-based foundation.

Rob Ashe says Cognos is delivering the 'next generation of reporting.'

"The new architecture is clearly evident when you install [ReportNet],which you can do in less than half an hour," said John Martin, senior partner at Triwise Solutions, an integrator based in Carlsbad, Calif.

"[With ReportNet] you now get Impromptu reporting and Cognos Query capabilities in a single product, and [you] can build a basic dashboard with scheduling so that you can broadcast reports," Martin said. "In the past, we've had to install Cognos Visualizer, [Cognos] Impromptu, Cognos Query and [Cognos] Upfront, but now we can get all of that functionality installed at one time."

David Folger, an analyst at market-research group Meta Group, said he views the release of ReportNet as a positive move for Cognos.

"The interesting thing [about this product] is that it covers a wide range of activities, from end-user reporting and ad hoc queries all the way up to [enterprise] production reporting," Folger said.

Added Dan Volitich, president of John Daniel Associates, a Pittsburgh-based solution provider and Cognos partner: "Cognos pitches this [product] as being scalable to tens of thousands of users, but as a midmarket partner, we're more impressed that it's much more efficient and better-performing [than its predecessor]. It lets us quickly build more complex reports much faster than with Impromptu and even reports [deriving from] different data sources. It also has a very nice metadata store that IT folks will love."

Rob Ashe, president and COO of Ottawa-based Cognos, said ReportNet delivers "the next generation of reporting,a single solution that consolidates what had once been in many different products."

ReportNet bundles ad hoc, production and managed reporting, as well as bill presentment, Ashe said. Cognos wants to make it easy for its partners to take the company's technology and OEM it to "make it look the way they want it to look," he said.

Given that the reporting and business analytics industry is in consolidation mode, Cognos' strategy of integrating multiple features in a single offering is generally viewed as a smart one by industry watchers.

In the past few months alone, Business Objects announced plans to buy Crystal Decisions, and Hyperion is preparing to acquire Brio.

Meanwhile, vendors not traditionally in the reporting and analytics space,Oracle and Microsoft, for example,are beefing up those capabilities in some of their products.

Ashe is taking a philosophical approach to the competitive landscape.