Cognos’ latest quarterly results were rather a flat affair. Licence revenue is just 3% up year over year, while quarterly revenue was respectable at USD 237M, but what growth there was came mainly from product support fees (up 13%) and services (up 10%) which is less than an ideal mix for a software vendor. On the positive side, an operating margin of 12.6% is quite good, and up significantly from the 9.6% of last year.

Less good was that there were 7 deals over USD 1 million, down from 13 the same time last year. Europe and Asia did better than the US. It seems that the financial applications business is doing better than the traditional core BI tools business, which is rumoured to be shrinking.

Overall these are certainly not bad results, but in a fairly healthy BI market they are hardly sparkling, which seems to be reflected by a dip in the share price.