In late January, the IBM Cognos product team informed Esri that they have neither a 2017 timetable nor a list of functional improvements to update their Cognos v11 API. This news represented a critical change in IBM’s development plan with respect to moving Esri Maps for Cognos to Cognos v11. Working with the Cognos product team all through Fall 2016, including a face-to-face engineering meeting at IBM in November and providing a very detailed gap analysis of v10/v11 API functionality, we were assured that Esri’s need for a v11 API improvement and update was their top, most urgent priority. Based on these assurances, Esri assumed we would see an updated API in January. When we reached out again, the IBM Cognos product team gave us their unfortunate news.
As a result, Esri has no path forward to develop our product and move it to Cognos v11 and beyond. Without any further options, Esri has moved our product, Esri Maps for Cognos (EM4C), to ‘Mature’ Support. What this means for our users is that we will provide technical support for our EM4C customers on Cognos v 10.2.2 for two more years. However, there will be no future releases or patches and defect or enhancements addressed. On January 31, 2019 we will ‘retire’ EM4C from official support.
This does not mean EM4C or our support for your work on Esri technology goes away. EM4C on Cognos v10.2 remains the most functional geospatial extension to Cognos on the market today and for the foreseeable future (IBM has told us of no plans to try and reproduce its spatial analytics capabilities). We will continue to support you very strongly and encourage you to keep using EM4C. We want to provide more assistance with things like deepening your understanding of all the capabilities of EM4C today, and understanding what our ArcGIS platform has to offer including our new web product 'Insights for ArcGIS.
You are not alone: Esri has many critical customers like you we will support going forward to fully leverage your investment in us. Please ask questions anytime. We know several customers who are also taking their comments and questions directly to IBM. We remain connected to the Cognos product team for any updates they might provide.