IBM Cognos Reviews

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.

• Ability to produce reporting solutions which are accessible on other devices (iPads, iPhones and Android).
• Ability to distribute interactive reports (Active Reports) to over 1400 recipients. It became too difficult to create reports on a portal page and have people access the portal to download their report, especially on devices like iPads and iPhones. Getting a consensus on the data that these “portal reports” had to display was also difficult for security reasons. The active reports allowed easier access to data (email distribution) and the ability to display more data without security concerns. Each report was tailored to its audience.
• Ability to produce self-service models and utilize self-service tools is a big advantage. I’ve successfully converted report-only data models into dual purpose, reporting, and self-service models without too many headaches. I’ve had success in training managers to use Workspace Advanced to generate their own reports. Some of the less computer savvy users had some difficulty at first.

• Active Reports: More detailed data is available to sales reps and management. The reports are configured for the rep/manager role with a focus on their own territory/market data. The reports are delivered to email, so there is no difficult and lengthy navigation to get the data to the recipient. The ease of use and access meant that more of the audience was utilizing the reports. The amount of inquiries, issues, and complaints was greatly reduced. We received a great response from everyone involved.
• Self Service: The demand for reports was much greater than our resources could provide. Being able to produce self-service models and deliver tools such as Workspace and Workspace Advanced was a huge benefit to my team and to the company as a whole. The fact that we could modify the current models with self-service style packages helped us to provide consistent, dependable solutions without having to “reinvent the wheel”.

When bursting a low volume report using a burst key, I would like the ability to copy myself on the reports. The Carbon Copy (CC) field disappears on the ‘Run with Options’ email option when a burst key is used.

Simple tweaks to some of the tools would increase productivity/development such as the following:

• Ability to control how reports generate queries to the server without having to use custom SQL.
• Ability to make changes to a calculation or column in Workspace Advanced without automatic validation.
• Allowing any object in Workspace Advanced to be moved/deleted. Lists become locked into place once placed on the page.
• Conditional formatting limitations in Report Studio resulted in more report versions for different audiences (Active Reports). We could reduce our 24 report versions down to 8 report versions with a more versatile formatting function.
• Formats are linked to specific data items within a specific query. Queries sharing the same data items should be able to share conditional formats.
• It would be beneficial to have prompts or other (render) variables to control formatting.
• Ability to ‘scroll lock’ in Report Studio: You create a list within a block and set the block to a specific size. The block allows the list to be scrollable within the report. This is useful when the report will be displayed on smaller devices like phones and tablets. When editing the list within this block, after every change is made, the focus returns to the top left of the block. This makes it time consuming to make simple changes to the list and ultimately making it difficult to keep focused on the changes.

We have used Version 10.2.1 for three years.

We encountered some minor issues. With Active Reports, we have a recurring HAL error that is being investigated by IBM at this time. It only affects 0.01% of our 1500+ outputs.

Other reporting tools such as Report Studio (standard reports), Event Studio, Workspace, and Workspace Advanced work well with no issues.

We encountered a scalability issue, but it has been addressed.

With Active Reports, the size of the data and complexity of our model combined with the size of our audience led to an additional month of development.

Ultimately, the Active Reports were generating far more queries than expected when bursting. In some cases, they produced temp space issues. Most of these issues were mitigated through aggregation, indexing, and partitioning.

We were able to streamline the Active Reports in the process which helped to a degree. The biggest gain, from what we understand, will be seen when we are enabling DQM. This is planned for 2017.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Response time tended to be a little slow, but their support team seemed to be very knowledgeable about the tools and best practices.

Some issues were resolved with “quick fixes”, not long term solutions which I didn’t like, but it worked.

Too many questions were answered with “upgrading to 10.2.2 will solve the problem”. This seemed to be IBM’s knee jerk reaction to uncommon, but known issues.

I would award them one point for their upsell tactic, one for their response time, and one for quick fixes versus long term solutions.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

I don't know about the initial setup as I was hired after it. Upgrades seem to take some time and some fine-tuning with IBM's assistance. There has been nothing out of the ordinary.

The standard user licensing is straightforward. It seems like they are expanding these licenses now to cover more of the tools so there is less complexity there. PVU licensing must be researched and understood before committing. The terms of PVU licensing seemed to be a little vague and confusing.

We discovered a great deal more by asking IBM some detailed questions. This will save us some headaches in the future.

We evaluated OBIEE and QlikView to the best of my knowledge.

Cognos provides a multitude of reporting options and I love working with it. I would recommend it as a reporting one-size-fits-all solution. If a simple reporting tool is all that’s required, other solutions might be more suitable.

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.

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.

Due to the way our product is designed, it has not been possible for us to use Cognos because of one of their issues. When we upgraded to Cognos 11, there was an issue with this version and we are not able to use the dynamic query mode. So essentially, we've not been able to use the dashboards and other kinds of reports in Cognos 11.

In terms of Cognos 11, we primarily upgraded due to the support for Cognos 7 going away. I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot. We haven't been able to use them recently. Most of the reports we've used are upgraded versions of legacy reports.

In terms of what could be improved with this product, the speed could be better.

The second thing I feel is lacking in Cognos 11 is usability - ease of use. I find Tableau much easier to use.

I have not used stories and dashboards extensively, but I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients.

The other thing that should be included in Cognos is Landing Pages. It would be good for the Dashboard Landing Page, if they could make it as easily and attractively as Tableau, that's the only other tool I've used, and theirs is completely visually appealing. The client should want to click and open the Cognos portal to get their data. We have our own product and Cognos is integrated with it. If they're able to get similar data, even if it is not as detailed in our product, they don't have any motivation to go to Cognos. They need to polish their product a little bit to make it more user-friendly and customizable - that would help.

I have been using Cognos for about 15-16 years.

Product stability-wise, I do find Cognos stable. We have faced some issues with memory in our client environments wherein if the client has created a custom report, it may not be optimized. In such cases, the memory gets utilized and the Cognos server goes down. A simple restart does resolve the issue, but that's still an issue if the client has a production server which is using Cognos. These kind of issues are among the biggest pain points we have. Other than that, Cognos has been fairly stable for us.

I am not very satisfied with the technical support that they offering. It's a very time-consuming process. The biggest problem that I see with Cognos is not the product itself, but the support of the product. That's where we always face issues, because whenever we contact IBM support, it's a very long and difficult process to get that thing resolved.

The setup is slightly complex for us because Cognos is basically integrated with our company's product.

So what happens is, we have our product and Cognos is a separate product, a reporting tool for that product. Whenever we release a new version of Cognos, we have to make a sort of handoff from our product to Cognos and we need to create some Custom Namespaces and do other Custom Roles. So for us, the setup is complicated.

But I have installed Cognos out of the box once, as well, and it was very easy. I did face an issue in an early in version 11.0.1, that whenever Cognos started and set up everything, a lot of times RAM use was an issue, even though the system had quite a lot of RAM. But if the system RAM was allocated to the standby memory, then Cognos did not get it. That used to be an issue. However, that issue has been resolved in subsequent versions.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cognos a 7.

I do like the product. I think there is room for improvement. Cognos has started taking steps towards improvement like new solutions such as Tableau, however, there is still quite a way to go. Cognos's framework model requirement does restrict everything. If you want to make any changes to existing reports, it is a tedious process to add some new tables or change joints or things like that, to make it part of the data model. That's one of the main issues that we had. But other than that, I'm quite happy with the product.

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.

Robustness:

• The environment is super stable, once you have the right environmental resources (CPU, memory, etc.), the platform will be rock solid.
• BI on BI: You will get KPIs out of the box in the Cognos administration about the usage of your environment.
• Audit: plenty of user information regarding running, modifying reports and other objects.
• Granular security and degree of access control.
• Lots of logging information, this will help you diagnostic any issues you might encounter.

Scalability:

• You can size the environment specs and configuration from 10 all the way to thousands of users.
• You just have to add more resources (CPU, memory, etc.) or another component (Application Server, Content Manager).
• And if you have the right design and architecture, you can achieve multi-tenancy.

It is a very complete solution: versatile, flexible, robust, and scalable.

It is serving as the single source of truth, consolidating information from various systems.

At the moment ,the metadata tool (Framework Manager) is client based, meaning, you have to install the tool itself in a workstation. You will also need any ODBC/OLDB and database drivers installed on that computer to access data and start modeling. This tool design and the way it works is already outdated. Your models can get corrupted for numerous reasons; that's why it is always good to back up and save your work. The tool does NOT support multi-user development, meaning only one developer per model is allow at any given time. You also rely on the file system all the time. A cloud-based / multi-user solution would be more than welcome.

IBM Cognos and the entire suite does NOT come with any source/version control capabilities out of the box. If you made a change to a report and, for whatever reason, you want to go back to the previous iteration, you will need to restore a backup or an export; if you didn't make a backup, you will be out of luck. Same with every single object in the environment (packages, queries, security, administration, settings, etc).

They also need to take more advantage of new in-memory technology, and have better integration with other visualization tools.

It would be nice if we could use standard XML as a data source.

I have used it for 11 years.

After going to a full distributed environment (Content Manager, App Server, Gateway), we have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good, solid. They gotten better lately.

We previously used Crystal Reports; a more powerful platform was needed, plus IBM Cognos is easier for front-end/business users.

Setting up a full-fledged distributed environment is not for the inexperienced administrator. On a scale from 1 to 10, the complexity level is definitely above 7.5. You need to have low to mid-level network knowledge; need a sense of how database connective and security works. Your average system admin might be able to do a single-server installation.

Don’t be cheap; try the product and scale accordingly. Pricing is a lot more competitive these days.

It was already in place when I was hired, but I had already have seen various products, such as OBIEE, Crystal, MicroStrategy, Qlik, etc. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses.

Make sure you try this product well before implementation.

Accommodate resources.

Also make sure your users and internal assets (administrators, developers, and architects) get formal training.

Hiring professional services is always a plus during implementation and the first wave of development.

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.