CAFE

IBM's Cognos Analysis For Excel (CAFE) tool is quickly becoming popular among business and financial analysts. This Excel add-in is separately sold by IBM (doesn't ship with BI installation) and needs to be installed on the users' machines. It enables the users to directly perform analysis in Excel with Cognos sitting as a layer between data source and Excel.

Cognos Framework Model works as the modeling and security layer here. It allows multiple data sources to be pulled together in one business layer which is exposed in Excel using CAFÉ. Users can directly perform drag-n-drop, slice-n-dice operations to analyze the data.

They can put Excel calculations like forecast on top of the figures and also create Excel charts etc. This brings the benefits of Cognos and Excel together and makes a killer application.

I would strongly recommend CAFÉ is your organization has data analysts who need to ad-hoc analysis over data from warehouse and various other sources. You would need strong data modeling skills and this logic will sit in Framework Model. CAFÉ is suitable for dimensional models and Dimensionally Modeled Relational (DMR) schemas.

A screenshot of how CAFÉ looks is shown below:

More information about CAFÉ can be found on the IBM website.