In the coming years highlighted on the Deltek Cobra Roadmap, it looks like Deltek will focus more and more on enhancing the reach of their industry leading earned value engine. Building on the latest developments announced at Insight this week, Cobra’s Roadmap focuses on similar areas of automation, integration and analytics.
Targeted for the next major release, planned Deltek Cobra functionality includes:
- Extending web services
- Improving performance in global environments
- Enhanced Replan
- OTB tracking
- Continued reporting enhancements
Of these, the web services and reporting enhancements look like the most exciting potential upgrades for the biggest cross section of our clients. The ability to leverage Deltek Cobra’s content via intranets that the web services will provide, will make it that much easier to leverage earned value reporting across a wider audience within an organization and should mesh well with additional reporting enhancements. The performance improvements for the global deployments we hope will translate across all implementations.
Deltek Cobra 6.0
Looking forward from the next 5.1x release, Deltek Cobra 6.0 sounds like it will focus heavily on expanding the reach of Cobra by integrating in some unique functionality of Deltek’s other EV engine Deltek MPM. Not sure if this means the ultimate replacement of Deltek MPM or just leveraging lessons learned from their other tool, but having used both tools we’re glad to hear their taking the best-of-both approach.
In addition to migrating Deltek MPM functionality it sounds like the other areas of focus for this next major release will be on enhanced analytics directly from Deltek Cobra, vs having to use another tool, and continued enhancements in the area of integration with the likes of wInsight Analytics. The marrying of Cobra and wInsight Analytics makes loads of sense and while not discussed specifically, we hope to see a tighter marriage between those tools come to fruition.
Lastly, it sounds like Deltek is going to address the concept of simplifying earned value, sometimes referred to as EV Lite. We won’t delve into the merits/complaints about that concept here, but it’s understandable that a tool vendor would look to address the issue as it continues to percolate out there. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in this area.
Summary
As will all software roadmaps nothing is written in stone, but its great to see that the Deltek Cobra roadmap shows that it continue to evolve. Looking forward to seeing how to best leverage these new enhancements on the ground when they roll out.