IBM Cognos Reviews

I've used Cognos in five projects, including Itaú Bank of Brazil, some Brazilian pharma laboratories, and an insurance company. I also used Cognos for work I did with HBSC Bank of London and another HBSC in Brazil.

It's very fast to access and the security administration is great. You can assign many roles to users. 

I've been using Cognos for 15 years.

The cost of the license is very expensive and it's costly to achieve scalability. For that reason, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are more commonly used in Brazil.

• Metadata modeling: Easy and efficient
• Reporting: Generally quick
• Online report studio: Generally works well

• Automating common reports
• Standardizing metrics and reports utilized through the company
• Enabling efficiency through reducing manual report creation via Excel
• Offline data source use

Data visualization could use improvement as many competitors offer more robust options for charts. More interactivity could be useful here.

The speed in which reports run can also be a large issue unless servers are very well appointed. Queries must be optimized in some cases.

However, overall speed hasn't been a huge issue since Cognos, Version 10.

We have used Cognos in general for eleven years, and this version for over a year.

We encountered some stability issues. Often application servers need to be recycled once a month. Unless report writers are writing very clean queries, database cache cleanups and server recycles are necessary.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Usually support is good, but it all depends on the technician you get. I've had great experience with some people, but less than stellar experience with others.

The one thing that has been consistent with IBM Cognos support is if you have a very large issue affecting many users, they are quick to respond and support your issue.

At one company, we switched to SAP BI/BO due to wanting an all-encompassing solution.

The initial setup was not complex. There is great documentation. It has gotten better as Cognos has matured, but some documentation isn't updated as fast as you'd like if you're utilizing one of the latest versions.

I don't have any advice about these issues.

We evaluated Tableau and SAP BI/BO.

Always plan for a scalable implementation that allows for a growing user base. Bump the server memory and processors up as much as you can so you're over and above what is suggested for each version.

Look at the IBM documentation on the server setup and organize the step by step guides for each server in a distributed environment.

Ensure that the security setup and groups are well thought out before starting.

IBM Cognos Analytics is a data discovery and reporting platform for your department or your entire enterprise. But it's much more than just managed reporting: It provides departmental users with the self-sufficiency they need to bring in their own external data, explore it, and even merge it with corporately governed data, all without needing to go to IT. With that ability, they can get fresh perspectives that are simply not available in their existing reporting environment.

I will provide customer examples:

• Time savings on report creation and distribution
• Real-time data analytics to make real-time decisions to make or save money
• Eliminated silos of information for a true enterprise solution
• Offline reporting for executives
• Real-time dashboards
• Many others

IBM Cognos Analytics continues to improve with every release. On the horizon are some major enhancements that include:

• World-class mapping capabilities (This is now available with release 5. IBM partnered with Mapbox and now offer beautiful geospatial mapping capabilities)
• Connections to more data sources (with release this is greatly imporved.
• Storytelling features like Watson Analytics (available with release 4)
• Connections to Frame Work Manager packages for dashboards (available with release 5)

I have used IBM Cognos Analytics (Cognos 11) since it came out late last year (2015). I have used Cognos BI solutions for more than 20 years.

Stability has not been an issue with IBM Cognos Analytics – it is a very solid platform.

It is an extremely scalable product, across all distributed platforms.

Different levels of support are offered and level 1 has 24/7 support. On par with any software company.

I have always used Cognos BI products.

Setup is very easy. There are three options with this newest product that limit the involvement of a technical install specialist.

Work with an IBM partner like Lodestar Solutions to ensure you have the right mix of licenses and you are not over paying in support.

As an IBM premier selling partner, we constantly review other products. There are a number of fine products available; however, IBM has hit a home run with IBM Cognos Analytics.

Ensure your specific requirements are defined and that your data sources are clean. If you are not sure how to do this, work with a partner like Lodestar Solutions, who are experts in working with you to create an analytics roadmap.

• Data modeling allows for better management and flexibility in exposing data from a single data model to diverse users.
• Flexibility of customization allows for designing custom solutions with ease.
• Scalability: It is very easy to add/remove a node in the Cognos cluster.

We have several reports that users access on a daily basis. We have also created multiple custom solutions to access reports from within an external application, as well as execute and deliver reports in a batch to a network location.

I think that IBM has done a great job with regularly improving this product and keeping up with the competing products. A couple of areas of improvement could be made in alerts for the application monitoring. It is hard to set up alerts when a servicer becomes unresponsive. The other improvement would be in improving the audit capabilities (including the database) of the application. The audit database is somewhat complex in developing good system usage reports.

I have used it for eight years.

I encountered stability issues, but it was more a problem in version 8. Starting from version 10, the stability issues have significantly reduced.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Cognos scales very easily and we have several options for scaling the environment.

Technical support is 6/10, more for the IBM partner from which we purchased the Cognos licenses. The challenge has been that most of the time, when you purchase it through IBM partners, because they are not the developers of the product, they have to go back to the IBM support and get the information and then relay it back to their customers; that adds extra time to solving the problem.

We have used this solution from the beginning, as it was part of the ERP purchase option.

Initial setup was straightforward. Cognos was very easy to install and configure and the documentation provided by IBM was very user friendly.

Cognos licensing is comparable to other competing products. IBM provides several licensing options such as named vs CPU licenses, and it is better to understand the current and future reporting needs before opting for any licensing option.

IBM Cognos was part of the ERP bundle that we purchased. Cognos was part of the package and was sold through an IBM partner.

Understand your current and future BI needs. Understand the information/insight you are looking to get from your BI application. Understand how you would calculate your ROI on your BI investment. Tool selection should be the last step in the development and deployment of any BI environment.

• Good reporting features: TM1 (for planning, plans vs actuals analysis, what-if analysis) and SPSS (for predictive analysis and other type of analytics).
• Integration capabilities: broad enterprise integration feature set, useful APIs and SDKs.

Self-service analysis features have improved a lot, even with new subversions of version 10, but I feel business users can't really utilize these features as they are not too intuitive and they easily find themselves lost among Cognos Studios. Query Studio is easy to use, but you can easily reach its limits. Analysis Studio is for OLAP analysis and it's quite easy to use, but OLAP needs a predefined multi-dimensional data source. Report Studio has lots of power, but it's too complex for a business analyst to use. Cognos Workspace aims to provide some self-service capabilities, but it's good for dashboarding only. Cognos Insight has been designed to close this gap, but it's quite a new solution; therefore, it lacks some complex analysis features.

Another area for improvement is error messaging. When an error occurs, the user has two options: the user gets a message that an error occurred, logged and please contact the admin, OR you get a long Java exception that you don't understand if you are not both a Java developer and a Cognos architecture expert (so there is a big chance that you will never know why the error happened).

I have been using Cognos BI version 10 since 2011, and previous versions since 2003.

Stability depends on many things, e.g., the quality of the Cognos model, the stability of the data source, the stability of the Cognos server environment, the stability of the network between the server and client application, the amount of data in the report/analysis, etc. Stability can be increased with a good initial setup and a thorough stability test of the Cognos BI environment. But it might happen that a user receives a strange and unidentifiable error message due to stability issues.

Scalability depends on the scalability of the source database system and the BI system, as well. Cognos BI can be scaled well, but the scalability of the source database system is more important in most cases, especially when a huge amount of data should be reported/analysed.

Technical support has two levels: first-level support is provided by an IBM support partner. So the quality of the first level of support depends on the experience and the quality of service of the support partner. Second-level support provided by IBM can be slow, especially when a competent IBM technical expert can't be found in your country.

I have seen some cases when an existing BI solution has been replaced by Cognos. It had various reasons but in most of the cases, the existing BI solution was outdated or the customer was disappointed with the existing BI product or simply the IBM salesperson performed well.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the product variant itself (for. ex., Cognos has an Express version, which can be set up really easy), and it depends on the planned BI architecture as well. So it can be really easy and it can be really complex, too.

Cognos BI has role-based licensing, so think well about which BI role you really need, and whether you should buy user- or CPU-based licences.

I always advise to use the right product to your specific needs, and evaluate some other options as well. Cognos BI can be a good fit for you in one case, but it might not be the best solution in another one.

Look for a good implementation expert who can help you make it a success. And don't spare on trainings; it's a complex, enterprise BI product.

The molap cube file is valuable.

We shared the molap cube file, which means can do analyses on their desktop.

Cognos is a good product with bad performance. We had licenses for all the features but users almost exclusively used the molap cube file.

I've used it for 12 years, since v7.

It has poor integration with other IBM products. In v7 (not in the IBM family), I overrode their upfront UI to integrate it into a websphere portal. In earlier versions, I still find these kinds of problems.

Almost all the time, we have a problem with Cognos stability and even our maintenance vendor can’t do anything to resolve it.

I think Cognos have problem with their dispatcher performance. In v7, I overrode their impromptu options, to catch performance requirement, while in v8, again, I had to override their dispatcher management with our code. Finally, in v10, we didn’t make any changes to improve Cognos, and now our users leave it.

It's good.

We are more expert than they are.

We used Infobeacon and now we are using Cognos and Microsoft BI. We are currently looking for a better product and are evaluating Tableau.

In 2003 It was very complex, and we must survive by ourselves because we can’t find any technical support for us.

We always implemented it through a vendor, but until now, we are more expert than they are.

We evaluated Microstrategy as another option.

Quality of data, flexibility and the performance of the tool(s) are the critical aspects of BI. Test the critical aspects by doing a proof of concept using a huge amount of data.

The report designer, Report Studio, is incredibly versatile and easy to use. Reports can be served in multiple formats, such as PDF, HTML, Excel, or even as a JSON data source. The meta-modeling tools allows for a complex security system which can automatically filter data, in any report or ad-hoc tool, based on a user's roles or groups.

The use of ad-hoc tools, like Workspace, has reduced the number of design requests, freeing the reporting team for more pressing and difficult problems.

Dashboards are slow compared to other tools currently on the market. Visualizations are improving, but still difficult to get just right. The default mapping solution included is only useful for the most basic requirements.

9 years.

Some users are afraid using adhoc tools. Migration projects which fail to take into account the different strengths of Cognos, demanding 100% pixel perfect migrations, will often fail.

The querying engine occasionally chokes on very large or complex datasets. Poorly designed meta-models can also cause trouble. Cognos will occasionally create dump files that can be larger than a gig each.

International distributed systems can have latency and consistency issues. The default round-robin load balancing works well, but the admin needs to remember to configure the weighting correctly.

Enhancement requests take a very long time to get into production. IBM works on the "squeaky wheel" principle.

IBM technical support can usually solve any problems. If it's not something they've run into previously, it can take a long time to get a straight answer. They provide hotfixes for really urgent bugs that are affecting production.

Most of my clients are long time Cognos users. Some of them are migrating away from Hyperion Brio because of lack of support.

At the most basic level, Cognos is a "next-next-next" install. While this works for very simple, low usage systems, in order to really get the most out of it it requires a great deal of tuning.

As a consultant, the vast majority of my clients hire out the development team. A few times I've been brought on to provide additional temporary support or training.

Hire experts to come in and do the initial setup and meta-model. Learn from them. Get training. Training is invaluable when it comes to using the various tools.