IBM Cognos vs SAP Analytics Cloud comparison

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

• IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

SAP Analytics Cloud is an all-in-one Software-as-a-Service business intelligence tool that provides the key functionalities of an analytics tool to SAP business users. This tool is built on HANA Business Intelligence (BI) platform, providing analytics from data collected from multiple sources, such as ERP, Microsoft SQL, and Salesforce, among other solutions.

You can use SAP Analytics Cloud to compile data and perform ad-hoc reporting and analysis for predictive planning. SAP Analytics Cloud collects and analyzes the raw data from transactional systems into intelligent insights that allow you to make better decisions.

SAP Analytics Cloud uses machine learning to clean up data, identify errors, and issues, and suggest optimization or filtering options. You can use the modeling feature in Analytics Cloud to create hierarchies and get deeper data insights.

The three core functions of SAP Analytics Cloud consist of Planning, Predictive Analysis, and Business Intelligence as a holistic SaaS solution that offers real-time analysis to business leaders.

SAP Analytics Cloud Capabilities

• Data discovery
• Machine learning
• Integrated financial and business planning
• Predictive analysis
• Automated data cleansing
• Custom widgets
• Mobile extension
• Role-based customization
• Data exploration and visualization

SAP Analytics Cloud Key Features

• Augmented analytics: SAP Analytics Cloud allows organizations to make the most of AI (Artificial Intelligence)-powered analytics through augmented analytics. It includes a Search to Insight feature that enables users not skilled or experienced in data science to access and use the platform.
  
  These smart insight tools allow organizations to visualize business data without manual intervention. By combining multiple machine learning algorithms, SAP Analytics Cloud automates predictive analysis so that organizations can have significant insight into secured data.
  

• Enterprise planning: As SAP Analytics Cloud is an all-in-one financial planning and analysis solution, organizations can use it to align strategies across all departments. It allows end-to-end, data-driven planning decisions via financial modeling, allocations, smart insights, and automated reporting.
  
  The Zero-based budgeting feature allows for an effective resources allocation with built-in collaboration tools. The finance team can collaborate easily, create budget templates and make accurate decisions.

SAP Analytics Cloud Benefits

• Real-time cloud insights: SAP Analytics Cloud makes it easy for users at every level to generate instant insights and improve data-driven decision-making. With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can have immediate and central access to all figures, diagrams, insights, and evaluations for every employee on every device and updated in real time.
  
  
• Customizable dashboard: You can customize your dashboard according to your requirements. This customization means you can easily access all the relevant data on a single pane of vision tailored to your business.
  
  
• Collaborative planning: As an all-in-one platform, SAP Analytics Cloud integrates the multiple aspects of a business into a single solution, including finance, HR, sales, and supply chain management.
  
  
• Data on any device: You can integrate SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP S/4 HANA and deploy insights to Android and iOS devices. The SAP S/4 HANA integration also enables the rolling out of changes to multiple files and devices from a central location, so you can carry your business operations on the go over a secured cloud network.
  
  
• In-memory technology: Since it is based on SAP HANA in-memory technology, SAP Analytics Cloud can process massive amounts of data in a short time.

Reviews from Real Users

Segun O., SAP HANA Developer at SOA PEOPLE, says that "The most valuable features are on the application side, where you can design applications into your analytics on the platform."

The Head of Finance Enterprise Application at a computer software company adds that "The visualization feature is the most valuable. SAP Analytics Cloud is also very easy to use."

"Its many features make it the best in the market," sums up a Consultor SAP Business Object, Sap Analytics Cloud at a tech services company.