Cognos chief admits 'customers have the best ideas'

NEWS Ron Zambonini, Cognos CEO and president, has revealed in an exclusive briefing with Silicon.com, that most of his company's inspirational ideas came from customers It's commonly thought that OLAP technology - at the heart of his Cognos' data mining and multidimensional processing software products - was Zambonini's brainchild. But speaking on the Agenda Setters programme, he admitted it was actually the idea of a large retail client in the US. "They had this terrific idea for what's now known as OLAP. They asked us if we'd work together with them on it and that's what we did. The result was [our product] Powerplay. A lot of things in the computer world work like that - a legend emerges about who did it, but often it's really about working with customers," said Zambonini. In the interview, Zambonini also considered the threat of software giants like Microsoft and Oracle. "It's important that you understand the application of the software and that means going into the customer understanding their business and working with them - that's probably not what Microsoft does," he said. The full Agenda Setters interview can be seen in the Knowledge Management channel http://www.silicon.com/a35068 .