Khalid Mehmood Awan - IBM Cognos BI v10.2 Administration Essentials

Khalid Mehmood Awan received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Barani Institute of Information Technology (a joint venture between ROSE and the University of Arid Agriculture, Rawalpindi). In the course of the degree, he stood third in the overall software projects development. The project was a Logic-based Argument Solver developed in LisP (List Programming, an allegro tool).

He is currently working at Mobilink, Pakistan, as a Senior Engineer (Planning) for Mobile Financial Services. He looks after the system KPIs and capacity planning along with product development. In the same organization previously, he was an application engineer and system administrator in the Performance Analysis team. He also worked as a system administrator for the Network Operation Center (NOC) in the same organization. He also has experience in project management working at Mobilink. He has Oracle Financial's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) expertise and gained this experience while at Mobilink. This was his first assignment at Mobilink, on which he started working in 2005.

His professional interests focus on system administration, programming, and database administration, and his current projects include MobiCash (a brand name for the Mobile Financial Service of Mobilink). In addition, he also has interests in iOS programming.

Previously, he was a visiting faculty at two local institutes, for teaching Computer Graphics (C Programming and OpenGL with Visual C++). The author joined Artologics (a local software house) and worked in PHP with MySQL as well.

I would like to thank the PAT team as I gathered the images used in the book from their test environment. A list of friends who helped me include MNA bhai, Gill Sb, Naeem, Atif Mughal, Adil, Mobeen Malik, Kaas Sb, Ali, Imran, Saad, Zia, Nowsherwan, and last but not least, Saira.

Terry Curran gained an interest in computers while studying for his first degree in Biological Chemistry at the University of Kent. He went on to work as a computer operator for a national supermarket company.

After several years working as a computer operator, he went to Brighton Polytechnic, leaving with a Higher National Diploma in Computer Studies. Upon completion of his studies, he worked as a computer advisor at the City of London Polytechnic, assisting staff and students with their computer problems and providing support for the various database systems in use across the Polytechnic. After taking voluntary redundancy from this post, he proceeded to the University of Stirling where he gained an M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering.

After graduating from the University of Stirling, he commenced working for a software consultancy company. While working for this company, he assisted with the writing of a software package for the publishing industry using Cognos PowerHouse. While there, he gained experience in Business Intelligence reporting tools after being asked to familiarize himself with Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay in order to promote the use of these tools to clients.

After this company ceased trading, he embarked on a career as a freelance computer consultant and contractor using his experience with Cognos PowerHouse, various computer systems and databases, Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay, and later Cognos 8 and Cognos 10.

He continues to work as a freelance Cognos Business Intelligence consultant and contractor, making use of his extensive knowledge and experience of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Reporting. Over the past 15 years, he has worked for a range of industries, including aviation, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and logistics, to name a few.

He is currently working for Ultra Electronics Command and Control Systems as a freelance Cognos consultant.

He was a technical reviewer for the book by Abhishek Sanghani , IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook , for Packt Publishing .

He is the author of IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager , for Packt Publishing .

Manikandan Subbiah is an information technology and management leader with over 18 years of well-rounded hands-on global expertise in various business domains and industries, primarily in banking and financial services. He has worked on a variety of technology stacks and open source technologies to solve various challenging problems. He has been a part of various IT solutions that were awarded by international forums. He is passionate about infrastructure solutions, SOA, cloud computing, and mobile applications. He currently works as a Principal Architect for Capgemini UK plc. In his free time, he enjoys travelling, trekking, playing chess, and watching cricket matches.

Will Thrash has over 15 years of experience in data warehousing and Big Data, primarily with IBM Cognos Business Analytics and Microsoft SQL Server, among other platforms. He has worked on data warehouse architecture, database design, cube design, ETL development, training, report writing, and dashboard creation. He also was the CIO of a global manufacturing company and has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

His current practice is consulting in big data and data warehousing with Market Street Solutions.

I would like to thank my wife, Jill, for the inspiration, and for enduring the time I spend writing and working.