Motio
Accurate and Reliable BI Implementations

Do you want a hand?” asked Lynn Moore of a neighbor working all alone in his yard. Although heading home to relax after a long day of baseball with his son, Moore, an engineer by nature who likes to solve problems, could not resist the impulse to assist his neighbor in need. Moore’s problem solving nature is the root of Motio’s philosophy: Help customers find solutions to their big challenges. Motio, headquartered in Dallas, TX and headed by Moore as the CEO has been following this philosophy since 1999.

Motio is a global software company and IBM Premier Business Partner offering solutions in the Business Intelligence (BI) space, specifically filling gaps in the Cognos arena. “We develop software solutions that enable more accurate and reliable BI implementations. We don’t make BI software, we simply make it better,” says Moore. The company’s overall goal is to not only provide its customers with innovative software but to give them the ability to balance concerns around risk governance. “CIOs are driven to do more with less and at a faster pace. In IT, there is a pendulum that moves between controlling risk versus moving at the speed the business demands. Motio’s products provide customers with the tools to enable them to strike the balance between governance and speed,” says Moore.

In line with the goal is the company’s flagship product MotioCI. The product enables customers to be more proactive and less reactive with Cognos by providing a unique blend of capabilities in version control, release management, and automated testing. The version control of MotioCI not only captures ‘what’ and ‘who’ made the changes in Cognos but also unravels the ‘when’ and ‘why’ elements. This significantly improves BI team collaboration, risk management, and disaster recovery. The automated testing feature of MotioCI validates the accuracy of BI assets and configuration settings, enabling content to be deployed with confidence. Another benefit is the product’s release management component, which reduces the time it takes to deliver BI assets to end users by providing a better method for automating and specifying content deployments to new Cognos environments.

Moore also grew excited to discuss their ReportCard product which helps optimize Cognos performance.

We don’t make BI software, we simply make it better

ReportCard is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that programatcially measures Cognos performance, identifies where problems are lurking, and implements improvements. The uniqueness lies in its ability to not only inspect BI assets but also inspect all the way through to the data warehouse. ReportCard essentially cuts the labor and the cost required to improve these assets. A company might need multiple skill sets to understand the reports, the business model, and the database structure. “ReportCard provides the ability to simultaneously improve all three from a simple to use web application,” said Moore.

An interesting instance is when the IBM Business Analytics Center of Competency (BACC), the department that manages IBM’s enterprise wide business analytics environment, approached Motio. The BACC was faced with administering the world’s largest business analytics environment, Blue Insight, for a diverse set of 200 geographically distributed business teams. Its required solution had to automate many day-to-day Cognos administrative tasks, provide increased levels of self-service, and still maintain the desired level of governance and accountability. Using MotioCI, the BACC has been able to evolve towards a “self-service” model for BI content promotion. From a governance perspective, there is an entire level of accountability, control, and auditing layered around each content promotion.

“At Motio, we constantly strive to be the market leader in filling the white spaces around Cognos. As such, we invest heavily in our current products to continuously improve them. We also engage in constant conversations with our customer base to understand their largest challenges in order to decide where to make the next strategic investment. These conversations led to Theia, our latest product, which improves the user experience in the Cognos platform and unifies it with other BI platforms under one portal,” concludes Moore.