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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
Sisense is an end-to-end business analytics software that enables users to easily prepare and analyze large, complex datasets. Sisense’s Single-Stack BI software includes data preparation, data management, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities.
Toucan Toco is a fully cloud-based, end-to-end analytics platform built with one goal in mind: destroy the friction that exists between people and data. The Toucan team has worked from day one to make every experience on the platform simple, fast, and understandable even for complex tasks. As a result, Toucan sees the highest user adoption in the industry at 90%.
Users can connect to any data, cloud-based or other, streaming or stored, using Toucan’s AnyConnect™ — a suite of hundreds of included connectors.
Preparation of data is equally simple with Toucan YouPrep™ , a visual data readiness feature that lets business people perform tasks with data that would ordinarily require a data expert.
Visualization takes the form of “data storytelling” where every chart is accompanied by context (like definitions), collaboration, and annotation so that users understand the “why” and not just the “what” of their data. And, to make getting started easier, Toucan includes an “App Gallery” of starter dashboards, GuidedDesign™ to aid the selection and layout of charts, and sample data sets for rapid prototyping.
Finally, deployment and management are made “friction free” with one-touch deployment from staging to production, easy embedding with web components or iFrames, and publishing to any device — web, smartphones, tablets, or kiosks/wall displays — in a single action.
It’s all governed with row, role, or user-level security with a complete audit trail and on-boarding and engagement is aided by user automation and management functionality built-in.
