Will Cognos Planning be replaced by TM1?

[mizu]

Today i was told that Planning is about to be replaced by TM1 in next five years. Does anyone know anything about this? Hoax? True?

[ovo]

Cognos Planning and TM1 are products in their own right that continue to be invested in.  There will be new versions of Cognos Planning.  The products have different strengths.

[mizu]

As for me, i see the difference between the two products, so i got your point. That is why im asking,..
On the other hand, this information came from a reliable person, so i really am a bit confused now,..
i just wanted to know if anyone else heard something like that..

[SomeClown]

You may see the difference but key people managing the Cognos products don't.  They may not be actively trying to kill Planning, but if you don't water a plant, it eventually dies.  One only has to look at their marketing efforts to determine how much is being invested in the old Planning product in comparison to other products in the Cognos portfolio.

[craig_karr]

I have also heard from people at IBM that TM1 with the Contributor interface will be the only Planning product from Cognos which is a pity for several reasons. First of all TM1 lacks the simple interface for business users to build models, it looks very dated and some normally simple procedures are so complicated in TM1. Further, TM1 is not built for handling thousands of users which you can easily do with Planning.

I hope they rethink. I think the optimal solution would be to continue to develop Planning and change the job server concept so that you could include the job server in every client installation and use all the clients that are idle when you run jobs as reconcile etc so that you could utilise the hardware you already have at hand instead of having to invest in powerful job servers and still the jobs would finish in the blink of an eye.

[Gunes]

Craig, as ovo has mentioned earlier - there is still investment being made to the planning product. I am not sure who from IBM told you that TM1 with the contributor interface will be the only planning product.

The next version of Cognos Planning is scheduled for release sometime in the next year.

There is also further parallel exercises to converge the strengths of both products into a single point of interest from a future product roadmap perspective.

[angela]

There is also further parallel exercises to converge the strengths of both products into a single point of interest from a future product roadmap perspective.

That sounds like they're going to eventually become one product to me.  I've heard both answers from IBM account reps - that the two will remain separate and that eventually it'll be a TM1 back end with a Contributor front end.  I'm not a Planning expert so I could be misinterpreting.

[chriso]

Recent "IBM Cognos TM1 Web Seminar" did clearly state there will only be one planning product.  :'( That was actually the summary slide of that presentation.
Some IBM'ers I met, pointed Adaytum code to be outdated and impossible to re-develop / modernize (dyalog and the libraries). That to be the main reason to go with tm1.

The presented 'new' solution is TM1 with 8.4 contributor style Eclipse client. That's been announced already:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/data/sw-library/cognos/pdfs/factsheets/fs_ibm_cognos_tm1.pdf
Looks pretty cool for the end-user. On-line reporting, undo-redo, sandboxes, you can even find dlist formatted fields (called pick lists). They also added charting capability into the client. Very tempting is possibility to create "planning applications" directly on the portal (no administration console  ::))

It's not so sweet to people who will have to implement and manage models (us?). My private opinion.
Its an OLAP-client architecture, so everything the Adaytum was in opposition to from the very cradle. Performance problems start already with several concurrent users connected to (lets say a dozen). Not talking hundreds or thousands. Doesn't matter how quick the TM1 engine is. Hopefully those are birth problems only and will somehow get resolved.

IMHO placing TM1 as the back-end database and adding the Contributor client is not enough. A performance architecture will have to be incorporated.

Agree with ovo: "The products have different strengths."