IBM Cognos Reviews

The most valuable feature is scalability. It works perfectly for companies from 100 users to companies with several thousand users.

It provides us with a wide range of professional report types through the central report designer tool, Report Studio. Standard reports, used through the whole international organization, have been made with user security to personalize the report output.

The Cognos BI suite is missing a user-friendly tool/functionality that makes it possible for regular BI users (not report developers) to make personalized reports. Generally, Cognos is not easy to use for non-experienced BI users who need to make their own reports.

We have been using this product for ten years.

There have been no stability issues. If the installation was done properly, it is a stable system.

There have been no scalability issues. The product is perfectly designed for smaller companies to multi-national companies. The server architecture must be designed accordingly, but it's easy to upscale by adding servers.

Technical support is good. The IBM Cognos support is usually dedicated and competent. Their reaction time is fast enough according to the support case priority.

I have worked in migration projects from BusinessObjects to Cognos, as the customer had bought a global IBM solution.

The initial Cognos setup requires experienced people. Besides a correct software installation on a multi-server architecture, it is important to design an adapted Framework Manager architecture. Furthermore, it requires experience to make some professional standard reports or other advanced reports, such as Active Reports.

Licensing is expensive and can be an issue to expand the number of users within a company or to get new customers. Only large companies invest in Cognos.

Cognos is not a very common BI product in Denmark, even though it's one of the best on the market with a broad palette of tools.

More creative licensing policies should be made by IBM in order to win market shares in the BI market.

Employ some experts with a lot of experience, or hire consultants with documented experience if it's difficult to recruit.

Be sure to give the right training to the developers/advanced users at the right time. In other words, don’t do it too early in the implementation phase before the product is used within the organization.

• ETL
• A lot of features
• Performance

These are important to big clients with big data.

For our clients, this product helps them make decisions faster, based on high-quality data.

The new version’s web interface isn't easy to use by 'regular' users. You must have technical skills to build reports. The product is not like QlikView or Tableau, where 'regular' users can build their reports on their own.

I have used it for four years.

I have encountered a few stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex; many servers.

It is expensive.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated MicroStrategy and SQL Analysis Services.

You need an IT team to support the users. It is not a BI-as-a-service app.

Framework Manager.

IBM Cognos is a Decision Supports Tool that draws an organization's picture and gives you a general scene overview of your organization.

4 years.

Yes, Report Studio's charts are not flexible size so you have to give constant size to chart.

Yes, It was the IBM Cognos mobile application server performance issue. We have to restart everyday.

No I did not.

In Turkey, IBM Customer Service and Sales strategy is very bad. Their level of customer service quality is very very low.

Their technical support method is wrong because they only give technical support to partners that are consultant firms . The partners' priority is money so it reduces the quality of service.

Now, my organization is switching IBM Cognos to OBIEE because of IBM Approaches.

IBM Turkey signed a project that is Legal Reporting with my organization but they could not finish the project. However they wanted to take their money out of the project so my organization decided to never use IBM's products.

The initial setup is a complex one that needs an administrator.

Both of them according to the project. We rated their level of expertise with POC.

We compared products with Gartner Reports.

Framework Manager is the best Metadata Modeling Tool and also Report Studio.

The Reports and Query Studio functions have been very valuable.

It enables me to see trends of data we have from different angles and each end-user can run ad-hoc queries themselves.

Framework Manager, Map Manager, and Reporting Database Connectivity features should all be free.

3 years including previous version

I was unable to use oracle 64 bit client to connect with oracle 64 bit databases. However, because of Linux I had to use 32 bit anyway.

Not much

We had some minor issues with scalability.

7-8 out of 10

8 out of 10

We changed because of the offer of more features and technical support than our previous solution.

For us it was complex to do it for the first time and too much R&D had to be done. Later on it was easier. It may have been complex as it was our first time setting up the Cognos.

Implementation was done by an In-house team who learned from scratch.

Good. It helped the purpose for which we used it.

I have little knowledge of this but I think we pay for each report we deploy

We looked at three other solutions, Netezia, Xplore, and Netcool.

Go for it but it will require training.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to change the reports directly on the server.

The solution could have more options for themes in terms of creating reports. Also, its drill-down feature needs improvement. In addition, they should include features for visualization in the next release.

I have been using the solution since 2015.

I rate the solution's scalability a seven or eight.

Power BI has better drill-down features. Also, they have efficient components in the toolkit. In comparison, Cognos is more easy to use.

The solution's initial setup process is easy.

The solution is affordable.

The solution is easy to use. Our customers could learn cognitive algorithms quickly with its help. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly.

I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos.

It is also quite pricey.

I have been using Cognos for about 15 years. I used to work in a company that was a partner of IBM. I was selling this product formally, and I created solutions with it. That was about five years ago, and now, I have started to work with it in another company.

I mostly worked with Cognos. I have worked a bit with Tableau and Microsoft BI.

It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos.

I would rate IBM Cognos a nine out of 10.

My primary use case for IBM Cognos is reporting.

I work with a few organizations. IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team. For example, we know which offers work and which offers don't. We've got a very good record of that. We have the very good ability to check the meetings of the actual salespeople. When they are made, who is in them, how effective the meetings were compared to what we estimated. It's very, very good on that level.

Additionally, the budget control is very good. We get triggers once a budget is crossed. It creates and sends an email to the person who needs to know, "Hey, you're in trouble. Basically, you've crossed the line." Which a lot of times you don't realize. You have a team of 20 people and the manager gets an email if somebody has done something or there's a problem, and it gives them a very strong awareness.

IBM Cognos' feature that I have found most valuable is its ability to create very complex reports which are not available in other tools.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful.

I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring.

I have been implementing IBM Cognos for over 20 years.

I think they're very stable.

IBM Cognos is the most scalable option, I think. It can handle thousands of users at the same time. If anything, the only thing you need is hardware that can support it.

This product is usually focused on medium to large organizations.

I'm really satisfied with the technical support. We encountered a couple of very unique bugs and IBM was very helpful. People from IBM found a quick workaround and then they solved the problem. So I'm very happy with it.

The initial setup usually takes a few hours.

You need a consultant or an integrator for setup. You need somebody to do it. You can't just do it by yourself.

In terms of pricing, for what you get, it's a relatively good price. It's good value for what you pay for. But you always want things for cheaper, but the price for what you get is relatively good, because everything is included. Everything, all the extra features that with other products you have to pay for, here they are just included. It's in it. You don't have to pay for sending out emails, you don't need to have an extra mail server. It's in the product.

On a scale of one to ten I would give IBM Cognos a nine.

I would suggest to potential customers that if they don't have experience, there is a lot of information on the web. There are wonderful video clips in YouTube. There are wonderful blogs. Before you decide on a solution, check. There might be something that's even better than what you thought initially. The abilities are so wide and amazing that a lot of times people take a solution which is not the best, because they do what they know and they don't think, "Hey, I can do something much better."

Make sure you know all the options before you choose one. And again, reconsider. If you checked it three or four versions ago, then check again. There are new features all the time that are changing and improving, and you can get amazing results.