IBM Cognos Reviews

Various studios vary in the level of control they give you in putting together a report. As an example, I spend most of my development time in Report Studio. I have always been impressed by the level of control I have in how my reports look, behave, and allow interaction.

• Allowed the organizations I've worked for to standardize the information they deliver to hundreds of decision makers.
• Allowed insight into the operations and trends of the business with speed and accuracy.
• The toolset allows you to create a framework to deliver a range of BI solutions. These scale from high level strategic dashboards with key performance indicators to tactical and operational reporting for the day-to-day running of business activities.

Metadata documentation could be improved. While IBM Cognos tools allow you to document most aspects of the metadata layer, the way this information is stored and exposed for metadata management is too basic.

I have been using IBM Cognos for 17 years.

I have had no issues at all with stability. Cognos is one of the most robust products out there.

There are no issues with scaling this product to a large number of users. The technical architecture is such that scaling is handled easily.

Most technical support issues that I had were revolved in a prompt manner. The amount of information on the IBM knowledge base is impressive. The user community online is full of some brilliant ideas and solutions that I have used many times.

Most companies that I have consulted for had IBM Cognos in place for several years.

A lot of companies that I've worked with outsource the set up activity to IBM or a second-tier consulting firm.

In every case, it has proven to be a wise move. I've never seen the choice of machines or configurations become an issue later down the track.

My advice is to outsource what you are not in the business of doing every day.

Do your homework on the licensing that you require. The penalties and costs involved if you are audited for licensing can be expensive.

IBM does not allow you to trade or swap licenses. Most companies don't allow this either. The definitions of what each license holder is and requires should be clearly understood before entering into any agreements.

Some of their requirements around user licensing for those who were only consumers of reports (e.g., they have output sent to them by email) used to be fairly onerous.

When I've been involved with a software selection, the contenders were BusinessObjects, Cognos, and Oracle. Cognos won due to its broad coverage of features and solutions that it covers as well as the product maturity.

• Resourcing: Don't underestimate the resources required to build good business intelligence reporting and analytics. For example, if you skimp on training, you'll have a great tool set that is going to be used poorly by its user community. Businesses implementing IBM Cognos need to get the balance right in terms of who carries out what activity, especially who and where report authoring takes place. One of the companies I've consulted for gave little training to people in the business outside of IT. As a result, poor quality and slow executing reports were the result.

• Culture: Use these tools to promote the right culture. A lot of the benefit of using IBM Cognos will depend on your organization's maturity level with regards to its use and implementation of these tools and how you integrate their usage into your business processes and decision making. The culture has to be present to allow any BI tool to be successful.

As per the technology itself, it is a very powerful tool with a lot of options depending on the necessities. It is also scalable to the business needs.

IBM Cognos has allowed our company to manage all the data we generate and helped us improve the results.

The product user interface is already being remodeled to fit today's market. There is also room for improvement. IBM is trying to have a more mobile touch. I guess this is OK, if you are using tablets. But if you are using a PC, why should you have a mobile look?

I'm just thinking about a scenario on Microsoft Windows: With Windows 8, everything had the mobile look and feel. Now, with version 10, it has the same look as it always had before version 8, but it improved and I like it!

I have been using this technology for the past three years.

I did not find any stability issues so far.

I did not find any scalability issues so far.

I would give the level of technical support a rating of 9/10. I also think the support that IBM offers is very good. When we have an issue with the software, IBM has good resources to get the issue solved. There is a lot of positive information over the internet.

One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine. However, sometimes it can take up to one or two months. End-users are not happy when they have to wait this long for a solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You only have to follow the installation wizard screens, indicate where you want to have it installed, and click "Next".

You need to have a good idea of how many people will be using the product. It helps knowing how many of them should have full permission (admins), how many will be developers, and how many will be "just" consumers.

It is a very complete product that keeps getting better and better. It is complex software and you need a good level of expertise.

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.

Our primary use case for this solution is reporting and analytics.

This solution has helped us in the distribution of reporting content to one hundred and fifty users. It has also helped in the management of self-service BI.

The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility).

This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how.

The jobstreams and the ways SQL-scripts can be effectively organized behind icons.

• It gave the organization a better insight in the quality of the data, which in many ways was poor.
• It gave the call center the possibility to monitor its effectiveness and efficiency a lot better.

• The Cognos Data Manager is very datamart/Kimball oriented, and it should be made more flexible, so that it can be used for architectures like Inmon’s or a data vault.
• Some of its components are not very stable (for instance the lookups).
• The prescribed working order (dimensions and hierarchies, then fact-tables) makes implementing design adaptations a complex and risky operation: loosen one thread, and a lot more go with it, and this should me made more flexible.

I've used it roughly for more than a year.

The stability of the Cognos Data Manager is quite good. It doesn’t crash very often, but of course making daily backups of your work is a wise thing to do, as with any tool.

No issues encountered.

We only had a company provide digital training. Their communication was poor, and they worked with a call center which was totally uneffective.

I had to make do with what could be found on websites and the internet. The information IBM gives here is solid, but very technical and hard to read. Other websites have to be handled with care as many contributions are more enthusiastic then useful.

I started using Cognos Data Manager because the company I worked for already used it.

To start with SSIS:

• SSIS is a lot more flexible than the Cognos Data Manager. In the latter, the user is pushed into the direction of a Kimball datamart architecture (data marts, which in a later stage are to be integrated into a integrated solution). SSIS leaves a lot more room to the user to make his or her own decisions (and suffer the consequences of these)
• The user interface is a lot more user friendly in SSIS, while Cognos Data Manager is somewhat outdated (but can in capable hands still be used very effectively)

In comparison with large scripts in Oracle and SQL Server:

• The Cognos Data Manager provides a comparison of large scripts for a real and substantial improvement. The icons and jobstreams provide a lot of structure, and are a lot easier to read and interpret than large scripts which can be hundreds of pages long
• Functions like lookups are very nice, but not always enterily stable (which is a serious drawback in their use)
• Combining Oracle and SQL Server databases with each other is a definite strong point of the Cognos Data Manager (although no longer a unique selling point)
• The SQL-scripts are pasted behind the icons. It makes tracing errors and the logic of processes a lot easier

It had already been installed, and I got a lot of support from other people in the company. I have no experience with a vendor team.

The company I worked for got a better understanding of its poor data quality, and many inefficiences in its operations. But in their mindset, speed is everything, and precision is often regarded as something of a luxury. They got more insights, made a lot of noise about it, but made no structural efforts for improvement.

• Consider carefully if you want a Kimball architecture with datamarts for your datawarehouse. If so, the Cognos Data Manager is a good option. If not, I think you should reconsider
• Consider what exactly you want to achieve with your datawarehouse. For having a historical database, it can be quite effective. For daily control, in most cases a datawarehouse architecture is unsuitable and unwieldy. Direct reports on source systems are than a better option
• If your organisation has issues with data qualities, a datawarehouse won’t solve these. It can only make these visible (and there are probably a lot of cheaper ways to do that)

I really appreciated Report Studio, because it can create complex reports fast!

Report readiness has really improved! Cognos provides multiple tools to help create reports. That helps provide clients with what they need ASAP!

Data Manager, InfoSphere, and Framework manager can be a little more user-friendly. But we are able to manage and learn from it. We can create data sources in order for the other data tools to function.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface. Sometimes it can be confusing to navigate through it.

I have used it for one year.

I have not had any stability issues. It is great software with great tools!

I have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support has been great. IBM has a wonderful support portal where you can submit tickets for issues that are way too complex to understand or control on your own. The fix central portal will get back to you ASAP and provide solutions to fix your problems.

The company has always used Cognos, as far as I know. Personally, I transitioned into this post when they were working with Cognos. I found the transition into Cognos to be easy.

I never encountered this issue, as it was already set up. We are currently in the maintenance and monitoring phase.

It is a great product. It is very simple to use and easy to monitor and maintain.