IBM Cognos Reviews

We use IBM Cognos for dynamic reporting to drill down to the details such as product category and item level. For example, call centers need data down to the entry level for a transaction. We use the solution to provide sales trends and forecasts as well.

Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly.

With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions.

I like being able to drill down to the details. The forecasting system is a valuable feature as well.

Recently, Python scripting was added, and there will be opportunities to integrate AI into the system to help provide a better experience for management staff when forecasting sales.

Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic.

IBM should provide more support for Cognos development. It is quite limited in Pakistan.

In the next release, I would like to have a mobile app for Cognos. For instance, Power BI has a mobile app for their solution, and I would like Cognos to do the same.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the scalability of IBM Cognos at seven. We have 25 people who use this solution.

The scope of technical support for Cognos is limited in Pakistan, and I would rate it at eight out of ten.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, and Tableau but had licensing issues with them. We switched to IBM Cognos because it's a mature solution. Also, the user interface and integration are quite simple as compared to those of other solutions such as Power BI. Also, we liked that IBM Cognos has forecasting and data structuring capabilities.

The initial setup was straightforward for me because of my previous experience with Power BI and other solutions. I would rate the setup process at eight out of ten.

I created a prototype based on input provided by process owners. It took about six to seven months to deploy the solution.

I implemented it myself with the help of a reseller. I had two other team members, one who was responsible for ETL generation and the other for the physical database and backup. We have one person who maintains the solution.

On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight. 

Because of IBM Cognos' design and implementation and because it better engages the user and customer, I rate it at nine out of ten.

There are several valuable features of Cognos. In this review, I will be concentrate more on the Automating Cube Building and Deployment without any manual intervention.. even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'.

IBM Cognos Transformer cubes are one of the widely used OLAP data sources. Normally, a PowerCube contains calculated and aggregated data that is organized as dimensions and measures, which can be viewed and analyzed in Analysis Studio and Report Studio (versions 10). Users find it easy to use and quick to access aggregated summary data which help in better analysis. IBM Cognos PowerCube data is static, and building a PowerCube naturally becomes a repetitive process. At my work place, cube data is refreshed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Since the data volume and the number of dimensions and measures in the cube are big, the build process takes 3-4 hours to complete. In order to ensure the most benefit from the cube, having a scheduled and automated cube build is essential.

Deployment and Activation a new feature which was introduced in version 8.4 that allows the cube file to be automatically copied over to a specified local or network location, activated and/or archived depending on the requirements.

Basically one needs to set the Deploy properties on the .mdl file using Transformer.

– Deployment Strategy: select the “Copy to available locations, then activate” option. This will copy the cube .mdc file to target server location.

– After building the cube: select “Automatically copy and active”.

– Deployment location: add a path for production and/or a place that .mdc file should be deployed too. You can select multiple locations. For instance, the same cube may be deployed to both the Development and Production servers.

– Check “Enable automatic PowerCubes deletion”

Once the changes are made, we need to use the Cognos Transformer command line is capable of performing certain modeling and cube-building tasks on the Windows, UNIX or Linux platforms.

The general syntax for using windows command line is as follows:

cogtr -n -lcognostr10=

Notice that after the cube build completes, Transformer automatically deploys and activates the newly generated cube. It doesn’t require any changes to the data source connection. The live cube swap is effective immediately.

Just a few more steps (on Windows environment), you can now schedule the cube build via a job scheduler application, such as Windows Scheduled Tasks. Here once the ETL process is complete, a Flag file would be sent to Transformer box to trigger the cube builds. You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule.

- Need improvement towards Visualization.

I've used Cognos in some form or the other past 10+ years

Yes, since we were implementing VB Script batch file process on the Transformer server. We had to do some testing to ensure success. Later worked like a charm.

Cognos is extremely stable... Unless someone develops and tries to run a huge data set.. Its all about educating users.

No

Customer Service is good and quick answering.

Yes, Technical Support is very good to some extent.. They would try the initial knowledgebase solutions ( which we would have already tried) .. but they do work along with us to solve issues... sometimes it is quick, some time it takes time reproducing the issue and solving..

Always been using different versions of Cognos - right from the Impromptu.

It was a mix of both.

In-house. I have implemented most of the solution specific to user requirements.. One of them is the automate cube build and deployment.

I use the product for my company's customers to provide analytics services.

The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to use the IBM Watson Applications and AR, along with its ability to generate new dashboards as needed.

Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

The UI of the product needs to be similar to the one offered by Power BI, which has the most market share presently.

I have been using IBM Cognos for more than four years. I use the solution's latest version. My company has a partnership with IBM.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup phase, and ten is an easy setup process.

The ease or difficulty experienced during the setup phase of the tool depends on the experience of the person involved in the installation process.

Most of our company's clients have confidential data, so the solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The time taken to deploy the product varies from project to project. In the last project that I managed, the deployment process took around six months to complete.

The deployment process of the product was taken care of by one of the in-house teams in my organization.

From an ROI perspective, I rate the product a ten out of ten since most of our company's customers feel that IBM Cognos is good for their business.

It is an expensive product when compared to other solutions in the market. I believe that IBM Cognos delivers the best functionalities for the product's expensive nature. Most of our customers know that the product is expensive since it offers more functions and features.

I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price.

I did not have the need to pay any extra charges apart from the standard licensing costs attached to the solution.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We use IBM Cognos for reports. We build customized reports from our vendor.

IBM Cognos did provide information and data that was utilized by the lines of businesses, in order to make their business decisions. It was a database of record information type reporting, that was disseminated out into the different lines and they made their business decisions based on that data.

Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category.

IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement.

In order for IBM Cognos to survive, they need to keep up with dashboarding. I know they're becoming more agile as far as being able to move away from a framework manager and use modules, which is great in order to build the models. They need to be able to compete with Microsoft B because Microsoft BI has beaten them up as far as reporting and dashboarding. They need to improve to better compete with other solutions.

I have been using IBM Cognos for approximately nine years.

The performance of IBM Cognos is good. However, it is important that it is implemented correctly with the proper resources available. The person managing it has to have the skill sets to understand how to operate the application. It's very reliable for what it does.

You could scale IBM Cognos to any size. I don't believe that the institution that I worked with or worked for had it implemented to the best of the application's ability. Therefore, it was undervalued as far as how it was utilized.

We have approximately 500 to 600 people in my organization using the solution.

IBM Cognos was used extensively for its purpose. It could have been used more. We did not need the additional application that was bought by the company. The task that these other applications were being bought for, could have been performed very well with IBM Cognos. However, the management lack of understanding of the application, and they didn't have the skill sets to work with the equipment nor did they have the willingness to work with it.

IBM Cognos technical support is very cumbersome. A large organization, such as IBM is very cumbersome when it comes to technical support because without having a dedicated support person for our company every time a ticket was called in, it was the same basic fundamental send me this file, send me that file. They didn't understand and we didn't have a dedicated source. 

I rate the technical support from IBM Cognos a three out of five.

We have a team of two that did the maintenance and support of the solution. I did all of the maintenance and upkeep of the application and the upgrade and everything else. 

Overall IBM Cognos is not maintenance heavy. Once you set it up properly, it runs close to maintenance-free.

There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos.

I have evaluated Microsoft BI.

Once you develop the skill set to operate the IBM Cognos application, it's a very robust system.

IBM Cognos has come a long way and they've done a lot of things with dashboarding, but it could be a little, too late, and not enough. They need to do better.

I rate IBM Cognos an eight out of ten.

I am using IBM Cognos the analytical pack that is provided, I've used it to do a lot of forecasting, proactive analytics, prescriptive, predictive analytics, and correlation analysis. Additionally, I have developed some leadership dashboards.

The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date.

The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help.

In the next release of the solution, It would be a great addition to the analytical tool pack if there were histograms on the fly it would be a benefit. I know there is a workaround on IBM Cognos and I've used that workaround to develop the histograms, but not everyone is that tech-savvy. It would be a great help if we had some of these features, such as histogram, box plots, on the fly.

Lastly, the solution could improve by adding some of the user-friendly statistical calculations, such as percentile calculations, median, mode, for calculations.

I have been using IBM Cognos for approximately two years.

The stability of IBM Cognos is excellent.

IBM Cognos is used on a daily basis and sometimes for the entire day. It is scalable. We have approximately 2,500 users using the solution. 

We had an issue with the dashboards and we were in touch with the technical support from IBM to resolve the problem.

On the overall experience with the technical support, I would rate them a four out of five. However, the initial response time could improve.

The analytical parts of IBM Cognos are some of the best in the market, it is excellent. I've used Qlik Sense, Microsoft BI, Oracle Business Intelligence, and to some extent Tableau. The second feature that IBM Cognos is excellent with, is the table structure that we can create on the fly. I have had a very good experience with them.

Microsoft BI is much more user-friendly and non-technical personnel can also start working on the Microsoft BI quickly. It would be great if IBM Cognos would also look at doing something on that front, where a non-technical person can also develop some small, very basic dashboard on their own.

The initial setup was a bit complex. 

The joins and structures that we had to create were somewhat difficult. I've worked on the OB as well and the RPD constructions that we do on OB are pretty straightforward. If we have some features such as we have in Oracle Business Intelligence, of the RPD structure, it would be a great help for IBM Cognos.

I would rate the complexity a three out of five.

We used support from the vendor for the implementation. It took approximately one and a half months for the process.

For some of the aspects of the solution requires maintenance. One of the features that we were using is the development of interactive and interdependent dashboards. For some reason, this dashboard used to fail when we would get out of the dashboard and close IBM Cognos and come back to IBM Cognos again. That required an upgrade on the application, which we did, but it was still not working. This issue required some maintenance to resolve.

IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side.

My advice to others is to be very particular about the architecture that you are developing because once you deploy it, it's really difficult to change and very complex to change. Once you deploy it and start working on it, and then you realize that something that you had to do, you have not done it right, it's a really complex process to change it.

The second thing I would advise is always to keep on top of the updates that IBM Cognos sends over. Some of the features that you might require in your work environment only come with the updates. You need to upgrade your application and that is when the features would be available.

Lastly, make sure that you explore every bit and piece of the analytical world of application because there are some very good features that the IBM Cognos brings in. It would be great if you explored everything and then start using it. 

If the cost is not a problem for the organization, then I would highly recommend IBM Cognos.

I rate IBM Cognos a seven out of ten.

When we started with the TM1 version of IBM Cognos, we developed budgeting projects, and it was successful. We also completed our first project five years ago using the solution.

IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets. We use it monthly for our tax numbers, and the solution automatically provides them.

The solution can be used for projects focused on employees' wages, contracts, contracted salaries, and additional outcomes.

With IBM Cognos Report Studio, we have a lot of operational information, which helps with sales, inventories, and costs from many different sources.

We have an analytical team, and they complete reports. We shuttle them, and many people in our company get information in Excel and email.

It has improved our credit department. They can get information quickly about client debts, and we've seen a yield through this solution. In addition, we combine sources like sales and production and have multiple reports that our team receives.

The TM1 feature is good because it produces numbers automatically. In addition, it has Super Excel, and there are big groups with a lot of information calculated quickly. 

IBM Cognos is easy to use and helps connect with databases and the data from our systems. It is also easy to learn and teach new team members.

We started working with Power BI, which we feel will be number one in a couple of years. Even though it still has some improvement, it's a promising tool. All BI tools have similar issues to IBM Cognos.

Regarding additional features, it would be good if the solution had conditional formatting similar to Excel, where you can conditionally format based on colour. For example, colour scales like green, yellow, and red make it easier to categorize tables, rows or columns by colour. Unfortunately, this feature does not exist in any BI tool.

We have been using this solution for seven years. It is deployed on-premises, and we are using version TM1.

This solution is stable.

It is a scalable solution. We have about six people on our analytics team and two IT employees. The IT employees maintain a data warehouse and work with SQL where the data comes to Cognos.

We do not need to increase our usage because our analytics team reports and sends all the information to employees, managers, top management and others in the company.

We have not engaged with technical support. We also have our own IT support, and there are no problems.

We used Excel before IBM Cognos, and we switched because of the benefit of analytics. Top management also wanted the analytics and created this initiative.

We completed the deployment in-house.

We haven't calculated our ROI, but if I were to survey top management or lower management, they would all say they benefit.

I rate this product a ten out of ten. I would advise a new user of IBM Cognos to have good IT support and people.

We primarily use the solution for reporting.

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.

We implemented it on the web. Before that, there was a separate request that needed to be raised for a report to be issued. We needed to fetch items and it took time. Now, according to their requirement, users can schedule their own reports. They get a URL they can access. They have a GUI on the Netcool page and they can access the data using this Cognos report. 

The solution is pretty easy to install. The documentation on offer is very good and it's very instructive.

The user interface is very nice. IBM Netcool interface is the same, and we can implement the same Netcool web GUI on a web page. Within the Netcool servers, we can integrate this tool to give users access to the environment.

The integration and configuration capabilities are very good.

The solution is very simple while also being quite robust and scalable. 

As we get new requirements, we need to see if they fit into Cognos. As of right now, it fits our needs, however, that can change.

We've had issues in the past that the solution is still working to resolve.

The solution seems to slow down the servers. We're working with IBM to see if this can be resolved. 

The scalability is quite good. this type of solution is built for enterprises, and our enterprise environment is quite large. the solution handles it well. It can scale.

Technical support is a 10 out of 10. IBM is always available when we raise a PMR with them. Even on Level 2 or Level 3 issues, they will come into the picture and they are used to researching if any issue comes their way. They'll work to replicate the issue in their lab environment and they'll give a resolution. That is very good and helpful for us, for our team. We are extremely satisfied with their level of support. 

We did use other reporting in the past, however, it was not as good or as easily scheduled as this product.

The solution is very easy to implement. It's not overly complex or difficult. The documentation is good from IBM. IBM tried to create not too much complexity in terms of integration and configuration. We can usually implement using the IBM docs. It's not a problem.

I can't speak to the direct pricing, although it is my understanding that it is high. That said, the solution holds great value.

We are customers and partners.

Currently, we are also using AIOps and IBM Watson also, which is an artificial intelligence tool that is also very easy.

We trust IBM and its platforms. They've optimized for monitoring very well. Their support is also excellent.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. So far, it's been a great solution for us. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) 10.x is a web-based, integrated BI software suite owned by IBM. It provides a toolset for reporting, analysis, scorecarding and the monitoring of events and metrics. The software consists of several components which are designed to meet the different information requirements in a company.

I have many clients using Cognos for their ad-hoc query and standardized reporting needs. It fits the category of an “enterprise” business intelligence platform very well. It also integrates seamlessly with IBM’s Cognos TM1 financial performance management solution for corporate planning, budgeting, and forecasting needs.

One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability. Its flagship Report Studio component allows BI developers to transform data in many ways, create pixel perfect objects and standard reporting applications.

One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics. This is something IBM has recognized and addressed in order to more effectively compete against other leading visualization products like Qlik Sense and Tableau. They have made major improvements in their latest release of the Cognos v11 platform also known as “Cognos Analytics”. This version of the product has been redesigned with a more intuitive interface and offers complete guided and business self-service capabilities designed to quickly identify and gain insights from your data.

I have not experienced many issues in terms of stability. The product is fairly stable, especially if you are keeping up with the latest releases of upgrades and fix packs.

With the proper end-user training and internal support, the product seems to scale well. As stated before, it fits the category/need of an “enterprise” business intelligence platform very well.

If you pay for IBM software technical support and work with a “supported” version of the product, then support is usually very helpful. Depending on how business critical the case is, they are fast in their response times.

I work with customers who have multiple BI solutions in-house. I position Cognos where I see fit, utilizing the application for its strongest assets and where I see the most value-add.

Depending on customer needs, complexity and size of the BI environment, the initial setup can be tailored to either being very straightforward or robust/complex.

If you are going to invest in a reputable quality BI solution, be prepared to not be frugal in terms of pricing/licensing. IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market.

Many organizations are using a blend of different BI solutions and there are many products/solutions on the market today. I encourage my customers to evaluate different products. Based on their business/project needs, they can then choose the best solution that fits their criteria and culture.

I would give the same advice as I would with implementing any BI tool/solution. Focus on building a stable and scalable foundation that’s built to last and also intuitive to the end-user. Place an emphasis on data governance/quality, change management and continuous product training for developers and consumers. This is extremely important when implementing any new BI/Analytics technology.