

Teradata and IBM Cognos are strong competitors in the data warehousing and business intelligence categories. Teradata appears to have the upper hand in terms of parallel processing capabilities and scalability, while IBM Cognos shines with its diverse analytic tools and ease of creating reports.
Features: Teradata is notable for its capacity for massive parallel processing, scalability, and strong analytics and workload management. It efficiently handles and retrieves large datasets. IBM Cognos is appreciated for its extensive tools covering analytic capabilities, flexible reporting options, and ease of creating ad-hoc reports and dashboards. Its customization potential and handling of complex reports are key strengths.
Room for Improvement: Teradata users point out the need for better transactional processing, enhanced cost-effectiveness, and improved cloud integration. Calls for more documentation and training support also exist. IBM Cognos users suggest enhancements in data visualization, ease of use, self-service functionality, handling of large datasets, and improvements in the user interface for a more intuitive experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Teradata offers flexibility in deployment across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, with technical support noted for its responsiveness and expertise, despite occasional delays. IBM Cognos is primarily on-premises but supports private and hybrid clouds. Its customer service is well-regarded, although some users express a desire for faster technical support response times.
Pricing and ROI: Teradata is viewed as a premium solution with high costs but offers substantial ROI through performance and analytics capabilities, especially beneficial for large enterprises. IBM Cognos is also considered expensive, with users noting its comprehensive feature set that aligns well with enterprise needs. Both solutions present concerns over pricing structures and licensing, with recommendations for careful negotiation and planning to optimize value.
At least fifteen to twenty percent of our time has been saved using Teradata, which has positively affected team productivity and business outcomes.
Independent research showed that Teradata VantageCloud users achieved an average ROI of 427% across three years with payback under a year, demonstrating the platform's ability to deliver a strong financial return.
We have realized a return on investment, with a reduction of staff from 27 to eight, and our current return on investment is approximately 14%.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
The customer support for Teradata has been great.
They are responsive and knowledgeable, and the documentation is very helpful.
Customer support is very good, rated eight out of ten under our essential agreement.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
Whenever we need more resources, we can add that in Teradata, and when not needed, we can scale it down as well.
This flexibility allows organizations to scale according to their needs, balancing performance, cost, and compliance requirements.
This expansion can occur without incurring downtime or taking systems offline.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
Its massively parallel process architecture allows the platform to distribute workload efficiently, enabling organizations to run heavy analytic queries without compromising speed or stability.
I find the stability to be almost a ten out of ten.
The workload management and software maturity provide a reliable system.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve.
We are generally satisfied, but I am not certain if IBM Cognos meets every feature request from users since we only provide IBM Cognos as our standard and do not maintain infrastructure for other tools.
I want to highlight two features for improvement: first, storing data in various formats without requiring a tabular structure, accommodating unstructured data; and second, adding AI ML features to better integrate Gen AI, LLM concepts, and user-friendly experiences such as text-to-SQL capabilities.
Unlike SQL and Oracle, which have in-built replication capabilities, we don't have similar functionality with Teradata.
The most challenging aspect is finding Teradata resources, so we are focusing on internal training and looking for more Teradata experts.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
Teradata is much more expensive than SQL, which is well-performed and cheaper.
Initially, it may seem expensive compared to similar cloud databases, however, it offers significant value in performance, stability, and overall output once in use.
Role-based access control (RBAC), strong audit and compliance features, high availability, fault tolerance, and encrypted data at rest and in-transit are key features.
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
IBM Cognos is evaluated and complies fully with all our security standards.
Teradata's security helps our organization meet compliance requirements such as GDPR and IFRS, and it is particularly essential for revenue contracting or revenue recognition.
Its architecture allows information to be processed efficiently while maintaining stable performance, even in highly demanding environments.
It facilitates data integration, where we integrate and analyze data from various sources, making it a powerful and high-quality reliable solution for the company.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Teradata | 0.9% |
| IBM Cognos | 1.3% |
| Other | 97.8% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 34 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 86 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 28 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| Large Enterprise | 52 |
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:
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.”
Teradata is a powerful tool for handling substantial data volumes with its parallel processing architecture, supporting both cloud and on-premise environments efficiently. It offers impressive capabilities for fast query processing, data integration, and real-time reporting, making it suitable for diverse industrial applications.
Known for its robust parallel processing capabilities, Teradata effectively manages large datasets and provides adaptable deployment across cloud and on-premise setups. It enhances performance and scalability with features like advanced query tuning, workload management, and strong security. Users appreciate its ease of use and automation features which support real-time data reporting. The optimizer and intelligent partitioning help improve query speed and efficiency, while multi-temperature data management optimizes data handling.
What are the key features of Teradata?
What benefits and ROI do users look for?
In the finance, retail, and government sectors, Teradata is employed for data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytical processing. It handles vast datasets for activities like customer behavior modeling and enterprise data integration. Supporting efficient reporting and analytics, Teradata enhances data storage and processing, whether deployed on-premise or on cloud platforms.
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