IBM Cognos Reviews

The reporting feature is the most valuable feature.

For Cognos, reporting is the widely used feature for both my clients and for most of the US-based banking organizations.

The product is the main reporting tool for our clients.

I would like to see improvements in mobile reporting. When it comes to mobile/offline based reporting, Cognos is not really capable of handling medium to heavy data volume.

The above limitation has been hampering its penetration into health care and other industries which are heavily dependent upon mobile devices for day-to-day operations.

We have been using this solution for over five years.

No stability issues. The product is one of more stable reporting solutions.

No scalability issues. Scaling is fairly straightforward.

Technical support is quite satisfactory.

The initial setup is very straightforward for a technical person.

If you need enterprise grade reporting, Cognos is a very economical solution for organizations.

I have never been involved in the decision making for selecting reporting tools. I have been on the report development side using Cognos for multiple clients.

The product is very strong for an online reporting based solution.

However, if someone is looking for complex mobile based reporting, they might want to weigh other options for their organization.

IBM support, suite of tools covering broad set of analytic capabilities, and ability to integrate with multitude of platforms

Need to integrate Data Discovery capabilities

It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports.

It forced us to look into the data warehousing of our entire existing products that we were using to better evaluate data retrieval.

It takes a very long time to learn the product. It requires specialization for different functions. It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it.

Eight years using different versions.

No.

No.

Not applicable.

It was quite complex.

Learn the overview of the product first before the investing time and effort on features which you may not use.

The most valuable features are activity reports and visualization. Visualization is fast and very powerful for a quick answer. It provides an interactive user experience.

It allows manually derived reporting via the DB and excel dumps to automated reports and dashboards.

In the report studio, the basic functionality requires more development.

I have been using this solution in different companies for over 10 years.

It is not very user-friendly with unstructured or direct DB connected data.

No scalability issues, but the data retrieval times of live data can be horrible.

Technical support was good until IBM took over.

I wasn’t involved with installation directly, but the consulting group set it up for us and supported it, so it was OK.

It is very costly, now that IBM has taken over.

Depending on one’s needs, I would push for Tableau more than this solution.

There are plenty of other cost effective and efficient solutions available, such as Tableau, cloud based solutions, and big data options.

• Data modeling
• Back end delivery options
• End user device options
• Report designer
• Scalability

There've been no improvements since implementation.

• More graphic options
• Its UI needs to be more 21st century

I've used it for 10 years in various versions.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

It's poor.

Technical Support:

It's fair.

It was straightforward.

We used an IBM partner who were good.

Look at the TCO not just the sticker price.

No other options evaluated.

1. Read
2. Try
3. Ask
4. Repeat

• Metadata modelling using Transformer and Framework Manager
• Visualization using Dashboard

Normally for BI implementations, these are the critical aspects.

I have not worked for an organization who is a direct beneficiary of the product. I have worked for vendor companies who have implementation expertise or have worked for OEM.

• Data discovery-related features
• Visualizations
• Speed of interaction with end-user

There are no problems with these areas. IBM Cognos has been working on them, but they are not yet on par with other vendors who are leaders in data discovery. For example, features like Lasso, dynamic pivoting, etc. are not yet available.

I have used it for 11 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I encountered scalability issues while reporting across multiple data sources.

Technical support is very good.

I previously used a different solution, and switched because of ease of development and the rich set of features for most use cases.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I do not have much exposure to pricing. I understand it is on par, in terms of delivered value with respect to price, with other BI vendors.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Qlik and PowerBI.

Please evaluate other BI vendors available in the market to make sure that you pick the right tool for your use cases.

• Jobs
• Schedules
• Auditing
• Report Studio

Cognos gives a consistent single source answer for many users to retrieve easily. It allows for prompted value, so many questions can be answered.

Auditing the SQL to determine if there are any particularly slow points. Also allowing jobs to send email notification when complete with links to all the reports within the email.

Seven years.

There are always some errors, but typically user errors.

It is pretty stable, but bad queries can cause problems.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

6/10 as they usually get back quickly but rarely have a solution.

Technical Support:

6/10

I used MicroStrategy before, but I changed jobs because Cognos is a bigger company and would have more job opportunities.

It is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take an expert to set up, but consultants will try to make it seem more complex than it is.

We used a vendor team. They talked a good game, but I would rate them at a 6/10.

Don't know, but it's not cheap.

It's not as good a MicroStrategy for data analysis, but better for static reporting.

The Report Studio feature has more customized functionalities to create reports and analysis.

Cube reporting functionality has been simplified for analyzing daily productivity.

This product needs to be improvised by:

• Clearly pointing out the issues/errors in the description to simplify the debugging process.
• Enabling more GUI based functionality so that creation of dynamic report and dashboards by using Excel/flat file data is easier.

I have used this product for eight years.

The overall stability of the product meets expectations.

Scalability is good. We did not encounter any issues.

There is need for a faster resolution and expected time frame to resolve production issues. Whilst working on site and when support is needed for emergency issues, a quicker response time is required.

We have not used any other solutions.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward.

If your organization requires features like more stability and customization of reports, then the IBM Cognos Suite is your one stop choice as a good BI tool.