COA nabs Inca Planning

As part of the fallout from Avisa’s acquisition of Cognos reseller Inca, COA Solutions stepped in to pick up the rights to Inca Planning, the acquired company’s planning, budgeting and forecasting program.

COA Solutions director of product strategy Mark Lane explained that the company had been looking for partners in the BI market when the Inca opportunity cropped up. IBM Cognos based the Inca takeover around a pre-packaged administration process.

“Were aware of Inca, because they had approached us previously. We got lucky and managed to get an inside track,” Lane said.

COA Solutions already has a web-based tool that is popular with its public sector customers who run Oracle-based COA applications, but it didn’t meet the need of commercial customers. “They typically wanted something platformed on Microsoft SQL Server that didn’t have the overheads of an Oracle application. We realised we were struggling to tap into a real vein o opportunity for budgeting, planning and forecasting in the commercial sector and we got a good product,” Lane said.