Cognos announced that Sterling Commerce has selected Cognos as the Business Intelligence (BI) standard for its new suite of e-commerce and supply chain management applications.

Under terms of the agreement, Sterling Commerce will embed Cognos 8 BI within the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, a comprehensive, modular solution that manages the entire inquiry-to-cash cycle in the manufacturing, retail, distribution, media and telecom sectors. Launched in August 2007, the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite provides a single end-to-end view of marketing, lead management, selling, orders, inventory, delivery and supply – plus returns, repairs and settlement – across the supply chain.

With Cognos 8 BI, Sterling Commerce customers will leverage the data embedded within the Suite in context with enterprise business performance to help them make key decisions at critical points in time, and react more quickly to changing business conditions. Specifically, customers will benefit from greater supply chain operations visibility using visually-rich dashboards; enhanced predictability through trends reporting and analysis; and better cross-functional alignment and collaboration through timely performance monitoring and alerts.

Both Sterling Commerce and Cognos applications are built on a services-oriented architecture (SOA). This ensures a seamless exchange of information between applications that will help companies respond faster to customer and partner requirements and offer innovative services at a competitive price point.

“Organizations today must be more agile in responding to customer demands and changing competitive dynamics. To be successful, they need smarter applications that reduce manual intervention in exception scenarios,” said Cory Wiegert, vice president of global product management and marketing, applications at Sterling Commerce. “The power of this partnership will be how it empowers our customers to manage the execution of complex order lifecycles for customers and partners leveraging up-to-date business intelligence data.”

“This partnership is yet another example of how Cognos and Sterling Commerce are committed to delivering solutions that provide the competitive advantage our joint customers demand,” said Ted Jandl, vice-president of global OEM partners at Cognos. “Integrating our BI platform with Sterling Commerce’s new and innovative commerce lifecycle suite will help retail, distribution and manufacturing organizations fuel their growth through deeper contextual intelligence about their multi-channel sales and fulfillment processes and performance.”