As a Solution Provider in the QlikView Qonnect partner program, Cogent is pleased to offer a full suite of QlikView services, including:

• Pricing and Product Sales
• Product Support Services
• Solution Implementation Services
• Training Services

To speak with a Cogent consultant regarding using QlikView in your organization, please email qlikview@cogentcompany.com or call us at 214.341.1004 x311.

• Business Discovery and Insights. Traditional BI solutions delivered the same thing for years: static monitoring reports that addressed only a fixed set of predetermined questions. But suddenly there’s a radical shift shaking things up, and the force behind the transformation has caught many by surprise. Empowered consumers are demanding the same functionality at work that they get from their personal technology: targeted, task-specific apps that are simple and fun to use, instant answers to any question, advice and opinions from friends and experts, and mobile access to tools and information anywhere, anytime. This solution will demonstrate how to satisfy these capabilities and more with SharePoint, Azure, and QlikView.
• Social Business Processes. Business processes are a part of every organization. Many are ad hoc in nature, vary in scope and complexity, and may be automated, paper-based, or both. Some are represented by a process diagram, complete with boxes, arrows, decision points, and conclusions. These may look great on paper- if you have them on paper. This solution designed for SharePoint 2010 takes these various business processes and helps organizations add structure and people to process. The result is Social Business Processes that drive effectiveness (making the right decision) and efficiency (doing things right).
• Innovation and Idea Management. Increasingly, companies are competing based on their ability to effectively innovate. Whether it’s finding the next great product idea to generate more revenue or continuously assessing and improving your existing processes to streamline them and drive down costs, the impact to the bottom line can be significant. This solution will demonstrate how you can use SharePoint 2007 and 2010 to help with new product development, process improvements, responses to RFPs, and new market innovation and provide you with a vision for how you can use the solution in so many other ways.

The schedule for these demonstrations will be announced the week of the event. Make sure to come by Cogent’s booth at SharePoint TechFest to meet Cogent’s consultants, see demonstrations of Cogent’s solutions in SharePoint, Azure, and QlikView, and talk about your organization’s needs and how SharePoint, Azure, and SharePoint-compatible software solutions can address those needs. Also, don’t miss Cogent’s consultants as they present some of the latest work and thinking we’ve been doing around SharePoint.

Gartner is talking about the BI market splitting into two parts: One part is the traditional BI solution focused on delivering reports. The second is a BI solution focused on the serving the business user, which they call data discovery and QlikView calls Business Discovery. QlikView’s Business Discovery moniker reflects who actually uses the QlikView technology, what they do with it, and the value it delivers.

“We believe that traditional BI solutions, which are primarily report-centric architectures, still have a role in helping firms make decisions. However, these solutions aren’t well-suited to meeting the changing needs of business users who need to directly interrogate and interact with the data in a self sufficient manner,” says Marc Hoppers, Managing Partner of Cogent Company. Indeed, Gartner says businesses need tools focused on business users and that QlikView is the poster child for this new end user-driven BI approach. Gartner acknowledges that business users are now more vocal, demanding and influential than ever. QlikView gets the highest scores from Gartner for end-user customer experience, vendor success, and business benefit outcomes.

“QlikView gives us a unique way to offer our clients a business discovery solution to fill the hole that traditional BI solutions often leave in the decision making technologies firms employ,” says Hoppers. Cogent will be offering a complete set of implementation, training, and support services, which it will announce early in May.

The QlikView Business Discovery platform is recognized as a groundbreaking solution that delivers true self-service BI that empowers business users by driving innovative decision-making. With QlikView, businesses can take insight to the edges of their organization, enabling every business user to do their jobs smarter and faster than ever.

Cogent Company has incorporated QlikView’s Business Discovery platform into its Business Intelligence and Analytics solution practice. Combined with its own project and analysis methodologies, Cogent is helping clients change the way they manage and consume data to improve business performance.

Register Now to join us on April 11^th at 2pm EST to learn how you can understand your business in brand new ways by:

• Consolidating relevant data from multiple sources into a single application
• Exploring the associations in your data
• Enabling social decision making through secure, real-time collaboration
• Visualizing data with engaging, state-of-the-art graphics
• Searching across all data—directly and indirectly
• Interacting with dynamic apps, dashboards and analytics
• Accessing, analyzing and capturing data from mobile devices

For more information, please contact us at info@cogentcompany.com.

• You don’t know which managers are helping you or hurting you… or, more importantly, which ones to hang on to
• You have to wait until weeks after the close of a month to know your comparable food, alcohol, labor, and unit traffic numbers
• You are struggling to identify patterns between the above comparables and other numbers in your business

The event will be from 11:00am to 1:00pm at the Tower Club in Dallas, TX, atop Thanksgiving Tower at 1601 Elm Street, Dallas, TX 75201. The following will be the agenda for the session:

• 11:00a to 11:45a… Networking and Lunch
• 11:45a to 12:00p… Welcome and Introduction
• 12:oop to 12:15p… Bill Schaffler, People Report/Black Box Intelligence Restaurant Industry Update
• 12:15p to 12:45p… Cogent Analytics Solution Overview
• 12:45p to 1:00p… Q&A and Discussion

The solution demonstration will highlight an innovative approach to data analysis and visualization using data from a fictional restaurant, The Sandlot. The Sandlot faces many of the same challenges that restaurant, retail, and hospitality executives face… lots of data in which to find meaning. In The Sandlot, you will see how we’ve attacked the problem by creating a solution that allows an executive or operator to not just drill down through the data but ask questions across the data, as well as to compare itself against industry benchmarks. “The solution we’ve created is not one that is prescriptive in terms of what it tells you… of course, you could use it like that,” said Eric Lakey, Cogent Company Vice President and leader of its Advisory Services Practice. “We believe that the best analytical solutions are ones that you can ask questions of and gain new insights in the answers.” Cogent Company’s innovative solution is built on a SQL Server database that sits in Microsoft’s Azure cloud solution. For its analytical and visualization horsepower, Cogent Company’s solution is built on QlikView, also running in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

While this session is intended as a deep dive into the analytics that might help a restaurant operator improve insights into their own business, the overall analytical approach, the technology platform, the integration of a big data analysis, and the visualizations will intrigue executives from any industry. While there will be obvious benefits for the technology executive, this session will be heavily tilted toward the business executive.

Space is very limited for this exclusive event. For more information on the event or to arrange a discussion of this innovative solution, contact Memory Bobbitt at mb@cogentcompany.com.

Join us on March 7, 2012, at Cogent Company headquarters and be a part of the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event. If you can’t join us live, then join at the virtual event site. You will have access to over 30+ sessions to learn about the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 at your own pace, on your own schedule. This event brings together a who’s who of industry experts and executives to tell the SQL Server 2012 story in this unique online launch event. You will also “meet” with partners, experts, and peers in a virtual “Expo Hall” to discuss SQL Server 2012 one-on-one.

On March 7th, 2012, this online event will allow you to immerse yourself in the exciting new world of data with SQL Server 2012. Engage not only Microsoft product teams, but with our partners and our most ground breaking customers. SQL Server 2012 is part of the broadest Data Platforms in technology today. Discover how it enables mission critical confidence, blazing fast performance, and stunning interactive data visualizations.

Hear keynotes from two lauded Microsoft SQL Product Group Veterans:

• Ted Kummert. Corporate Vice President, Business Platform Division, Microsoft. Join Ted Kummert as he explores the Microsoft data evolution vision. As data continues to explode, executives are facing a sea of change and exploring short and long-term solutions to handle this unprecedented growth. The new world of data brings organizations an incredible opportunity to access, blend, and analyze traditional and non-traditional data for new business models and opportunities.
• Quentin Clark. Corporate Vice President, Database Systems Group, Microsoft. Join this launch session to get a high-level look at what’s new in SQL Server 2012, the cloud-ready information platform. Through SQL Server 2012, Quentin will address some of the tough issues facing IT organizations today; mission critical SLAs that are simply expected, the explosion of data volumes and the need to get insights from this data, and the evolution into the virtualized world—all backed by product demos from SQL Server product experts.

If you are technical, and you would like to grab the latest and greatest versions of Microsoft SQL and the related technology, follow this link. The Base ImageX Server is a virtual machine that can be hosted in Hyper-V that allows a user to test out the latest Business Intelligence features of SQL Server 2012 – RC0. The virtual machine has been configured to support the use of PowerView reports, PowerPivot Excel documents and various content packs allowing the user to explore the capabilities of SQL Server 2012. Working with the demos that can be installed on the ImageX server the user will have a clear picture of how the SQL Server 2012, Office and SharePoint tools support and enhance the self-service business intelligence environment.

Two opporutnities to hear the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Lauch Event:

• Join us at Cogent Company HQ at 5646 Milton Street, Suite 500, Dallas, TX 75206 on Wednesday, March 7, 2012.
• Join the Virtual Launch here.

For more information on either way to join the SQL Server 2012 launch, contact Memory Bobbitt at mb@cogentcompany.com

• Building SharePoint UIs without Human Sacrifice… or How to Create Custom SharePoint Ribbons the Easy Way will be presented by Ty Anderson. Ty Anderson is a founding partner at Cogent Company and is in charge of the Custom Application Development and Productivity practices.  Ty is a specialist on the Microsoft technology stack and uses his knowledge to architect and build solutions for Cogent’s clients. Ty frequently speaks and writes about Microsoft products, with his work having been published on MSDN, Devx.com, DevSource.com, SimpleTalk.com and CIO.com.  Ty is also the author of two books covering Office development (VSTO) and recently published a Beginning Word 2010 book (all by Apress). Ty has more than 15 years of business and technology consulting experience specializing in business process management, application development, and application integration.  Ty has degrees in Accounting and Spanish from Texas Tech University.
• Tripping on SharePoint + Azure will be presented by Simon Saugier and Ben Collins. Benjamin Collins is a Senior Consultant at Cogent Company, and a member of the Custom Application Development and Productivity practices. Ben has extensive experience in the Microsoft .NET technology stack, as well as a strong background in cross-platform development and systems programming.  He specializes in mobile and SharePoint (and other server-side) application development. Ben is also interested in technically challenging application domains, parallel and distributed computing, and mobile computing, as well as software engineering and application lifecycle management. Ben has over seven  years of experience developing high-performance distributed systems and web applications, and has been a software engineer in academic, enterprise, defense, and IT environments, as well as a software development intern at Microsoft.  Benjamin holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Masters of Engineering from Texas A&M University. Simon Saugier is a Senior Consultant at Cogent Company and a member of Cogent’s Information Management and Application Development Consulting Practices. Simon has 6 years of experience in both open-source and Microsoft technologies.  Mr. Saugier has received professional training in QlikView technology and leads the company’s QlikView development practice. Simon is also experienced with SQL Server and is an Embarcadero ER/Studio Data Architect. Simon has extensive experience in application development and web services development.  Simon graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University.

SharePoint TechFest 2012 is the largest SharePoint Conference in the Central Region of the United States. On Thursday, May 17, 2012, the fourth SharePoint TechFest 2012 will feature a keynote presentation and 20 break-out sessions categorized into distinct tracks:

• Cloud Overview and Opportunities
• SharePoint Online
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Sites &Communities (Collaboration & Social Computing)
• Composites (Workflows)
• Search
• Business Intelligence (Insights)
• Development

Within each track, presentations are given by various subject matter experts from System Integrators (SI’s), Learning Partners, Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and Microsoft. SharePoint TechFest is ideal for everyone who uses SharePoint… IT/MIS directors, managers and staff, IT professionals, business decision makers, network managers, administrators and staff, developers, and systems and application architects.  “We continue to see value in TechFest not only for us to showcase our capabilities and work but also for our team and clients to see what other folks are doing with SharePoint,” said Ty Anderson, Cogent Founder and Vice President.

Make sure to come by Cogent’s booth at SharePoint TechFest to meet Cogent’s consultants, see demonstrations of Cogent’s solutions in SharePoint, Azure, and QlikView, and talk about your organization’s needs and objectives.

Register Now for SharePoint TechFest using discount code COG50 in the discount code box to receive a special rate of $149, which includes the full day event, lunch, reception, give-a-ways, and so much more.

Thursday, May 17, 2012
8:00 am – 6:00 pm
Irving Convention Center
500 Las Colinas Boulevard West
Irving, Texas 75039