MotioCI Product Launch

Las Vegas, NV, June 26th, 2006 - Motio unveiled their Continuous Integration Server ("MotioCI";) product this week at the annual Cognos User Forum. MotioCI is a server based offering which augments Cognos environments with automated version control for reports, regression testing for Business Intelligence ("BI") content and monitoring features which help BI content authors monitor changes in the environment.

"We feel this product is a no-brainer for anyone authoring serious BI content in a Cognos environment," said Lance Hankins, CTO of Motio. "By automatically versioning all BI content, MotioCI acts as a safety net for Cognos environments. For every report in the system, you can see the complete change history - each report revision, who created it, what changes were made, etc."

This feature, coupled with the ability to create automated regression tests for BI content, promotes consistency and integrity of the information produced.

"Modern BI environments tend to be made up of many moving parts," said Hankins. "A typical Cognos BI project involves multiple upstream datasources, a set of ETL processes, one or more data marts or warehouses, a metadata layer, hundreds of report specs and cubes, and perhaps even custom applications which front-end this content. There are typically teams of people responsible for building out each of these layers and changes at any level can introduce errors or inefficiencies in BI outputs."

For BI development environments, the industry still relies largely on periodic, manual verification to ensure the quality and consistency of what is produced, Hankins explained. "By allowing project stakeholders to automate the process of testing and verification during the development cycle, MotioCI acts as a 'smoke detector' for Cognos environments - continually verifying the BI content and sounding an alarm when a problem is detected."

The MotioCI product also contains sophisticated, monitoring agents which provide insight into 'who is changing what' in both Cognos and the BI environment as a whole. By coupling the automated regression testing capability with these monitoring features, the debugging time is reduced dramatically when a problem arises. "When a test starts to fail, you have a list of all recent changes staring you in the face," Hankins said, "This makes it very easy to narrow down the list of likely culprits."

Targeted at Cognos 8 and ReportNet users, MotioCI is the third product in the Motio BI product family. The line also includes the MotioADF and the MotioCAP products.