IBM's Cognos 8 business intelligence software is now generally available for System z mainframes running Linux, the company announced Monday.

The company announced its plans to port Cognos 8 to System z in February.

"Customers are looking beyond transactional applications, saying, 'Can I deliver more in my mainframe environment,' and business intelligence is one of these," said Jennifer Hanniman, senior product marketing manager, Cognos 8 Platform.

In addition, customers are viewing business intelligence as mission critical, and are therefore being drawn to business intelligence on System z due to the mainframe's aura of reliabusiness intelligencelity and scalabusiness intelligencelity, according to Hanniman.

Also, running Cognos directly on the mainframe also eliminates the need to first push information into a data warehouse, she said.

IBM went with Linux support first because Cognos was already compatible with it, according to Hanniman. The company plans to support additional System z operating systems, but has no roadmap as of yet, she said.

The software will cost about US$200 per user, with volume discounts available.

Analysts called IBM's move a pragmatic and expected one, given its roughly $5 business intelligencellion investment in Cognos, as well as a desire to keep its mainframe business strong as the industry increasingly moves to commodity-hardware server farms and eyes cloud computing services for its infrastructure needs.

System z is "a huge cash cow" for the company said analyst Judith Hurwitz. Porting Cognos to it "puts more fodder into the message that the mainframe is a good citizen."

However, IBM isn't first to market with the concept, and it's unclear how much demand there is right now for running business intelligence natively on the mainframe, according to Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

"This is not a truly differentiating feature for business intelligence, since Information Builders and SAS already run some portions of their business intelligence products on mainframe," he noted via e-mail Monday. "In all honesty, I have not heard a single request from our clients looking to run business intelligence on a mainframe. Pulling data from a mainframe, yes, but most all business intelligence vendors offer that."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.