IBM Cognos Reviews

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.

I primary use IBM Cognos BI as the preferred tool for my consultancy activity. I use it since 1999, and I've worked with IBM Cognos suite since its version 5.5 until the current version 11.

Flexibility: It offers a variety of technical solutions to better satisfy each customer’s needs and scenarios.

IBM Cognos BI (version 10) is a suite of different modules for reporting and analysis:

• Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting.
• Workspace Advanced: A mid-powerful tool, to create reports of medium complexity.
• Query Studio: An easy tool to quickly create ad-hoc queries (with a simple list, or crosstab, or chart).
• Analysis Studio: A simple tool to create analysis (like pivot-tables in Excel).
• Workspace: A very basic tool to build and show dashboards using other reports components.
• Metric Studio: A tool to create scorecards showing trends for corporate KPI and metrics.
• Event Studio: A tool that notifies the user of events happening in corporate data.

Each of them is perfect for a specific need.

For the metadata modeling activity, as well, Cognos offers several modeling tools:

• Framework Manager: The most flexible and used tool for metadata modeling.
• Transformer: The tool to create multi-dimensional cubes (MOLAP cubes).
• Cube Designer: The tool to create dynamic cubes (ROLAP cubes).
• Metric Designer: The tool to create data packages to be used by Metric Studio to create scorecards.

Depending on how much data has to be analyzed (or other factors), the modeler will decide which modeling tool to use.

I’m a freelancer; I am a consultant. I’ve helped hundreds of customers to better understand their business and to make better decisions.

I think IBM Cognos BI solution needs improvements in:

1) chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't.

2) data source connections: many other competitors support connections to cloud and innovative data sources (Google Analytics, Facebook, Microsoft Azure, MongoDb, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint and so on), that IBM Cognos BI cannot connect to.

3) maps: IBM Cognos BI have only 35 predefined maps. If you need a map of a particular area, you need to buy it (in MapInfo or Esri formats) and convert it in Cognos format, and this is pretty a long way. Furthermore, it's very inconvenient to use Google Maps maps, since this kind of integration is not native.

I sometimes encounter stability issues, but they’re rarely really issues.

I have never encountered any scalability issues. The product easily scales very well.

I would rate technical support between 2 and 3 our of 10. Several times in the past, I have needed the help of IBM official technical support, and there was more lost time than any actual contribution received. The IBM technical support people often know IBM products less than I do. So, nowadays, I no longer make use of technical support; it’s almost always useless. This means I do not waste a lot of time for no reason.

I’ve always used this solution.

When I initially studied the IBM Cognos software, it was not so easy to fully understand, but now all in all it’s not so complex.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing IBM Cognos.

In the last weeks I'm having a look to Tableau Software.

Be sure you have an expert Cognos consultant before starting.

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.

I use IBM Cognos for various purposes in our business. We use it to generate email triggers based on alerts as a self-service BI tool where users can drag and drop for analysis and predictive analysis using the integrated IBM Watson. We also use it for presentations and business reporting.

You can customize your data according to your needs. It has all the functions and capabilities, making it easy to use. You can customize datasets at the business layer based on your preferences, which is very convenient. Compared to Power BI, IBM Cognos offers more flexibility, like joining data at the report level and applying any needed customizations. You can also set up role-level security so users only see the data they need. Additionally, you can distribute reports as needed. It's easy to integrate with other systems like Active Directory.

The tool integrates IBM Watson, which is used for predictive analysis. Simply dragging and dropping your data, IBM Watson provides trends and insights, making Cognos stronger in AI than other tools.

The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau.

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product.

I have been working with the product for eight years. 

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. 

The tool's installation and maintenance are easy, and the setup process is quite easy—I'd rate it an eight out of ten. Deployment only takes about 30-40 minutes, involving exporting a package from development and importing it to production.

IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

One of the features I find most valuable in the latest release is the Visual Storytelling functionality and being able to tell stories visually with your data. While stories are similar to dashboards in that they use visualizations to share insights, they differ as they provide a description over time and are actionable in nature.

This product has improved the way our organization and our customers truly interact with information, really putting the capabilities into the hands of the key decision makers and not having to rely on IT resources that do not have the business knowledge to do this for them; true self-service analytics.

The key areas for improvement are the administrative capabilities that are largely the same from the series 8/10 versions and the ability to use Framework Manager packages and models on new dashboards, etc. The introduction of data sets in the latest version demonstrates that this functionality is going to be offered around the corner.

While IBM Cognos Analytics has been on the market for under a year, I have been using the Cognos platform for nearly 15 years and have seen it continue to grow and mature.

I have not encountered any stability issues. The IBM Cognos platform has been around a while and with the right people doing the install/configuration/management of the environment, it is pretty rock solid. IBM is coming out with new minor releases every 2-3 months, which is great for customers as you can tell the commitment to excellence with the product is there.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support has been pretty responsive. I run an IBM Cognos professional services organization and we become the front-line support for many of our customers.

I have been installing/configuring IBM Cognos BI environments for years and I will have to say the documentation for the first iteration of IBM Cognos Analytics 11.0.0 was not complete and created a few challenges. The subsequent releases have been more complete and the latest version is pretty solid.

Pricing and licensing really comes down to what customers are looking to achieve, as there are lots of options out there. IBM Cognos Analytics offers a fully managed SaaS Cognos in the cloud offering, where a customer does not have to deal with infrastructure, maintenance, administration, or provisioning. This is a great option for many SMBs out there. For other larger customers, it comes down to the number of users, what roles they will have, and internal IT capabilities that they have. One of IBM Cognos’ greatest strengths is the ability to cover the whole spectrum of customers at a price point that is acceptable to all.

I led a large vendor selection process at a former company around 13 years ago where I had 10 vendors come in and do a product demonstration based on our business requirements and from there, I was able to narrow the field down to Information Builders and SAP BusinessObjects. For the flexibility, self-service capabilities, and in-memory OLAP functionality, Cognos was the clear winner for us.

I am a strong believer in having the right tool to do the right job. I believe IBM Cognos BI has been and continues to be a solution that I have seen great results in and continue to recommend. However, I recognize that there are strengths that other vendors bring to the table and solutions that could be a better fit in some circumstances.

It does a fantastic job of promoting true self service and allowing line of business users the ability to load their data without the need for IT involvement. Non-technical people can easily upload their data and start to perform analyses of their business creating attractive dashboards and asking key questions based on empirical data.

Dashboards and visualizations are the product’s most valuable features. Most of my customers are moving from reporting to dashboards and mobile. They are keeping reporting only for daily/weekly/monthly basic reports. All other communication of metrics/KPIs and operational information are moving to dashboards and visualizations and many are looking for mobile solutions.

• Better collaboration

There is room for improvement in the user interface, which might simply be a learning curve issue. It has changed dramatically and some of the functionality is very different. For example, getting a list of reports requires some extra clicks to get the full list and the entire file name is not visible in all views.

Some important bugs still exist in the product, including:

• Not being able to change packages on a published report
• Some issues with Framework Manager in Cognos 11 not connecting properly when the 10.2.2 version is still installed

I have used it for two months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

We previously used Cognos 10.2.2; upgraded for new features.

Initial setup was complex. Cognos is a very complex tool to configure.

Get bulk licensing if at all possible. IBM has a very structured pricing model.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

Make sure you have good IBM support in place before installing, and read all associated documentation. Third-party or IBM installation would be recommended.

Most of my customers are on-premise, but I have two customers who are on the cloud.

IBM Cognos is used for reporting and I work with all businesses, but mainly in the banking and insurance industry.

The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them.

IBM Cognos is a very big solution, and it is similar to other large solutions, such as SAP and Oracle, everything is in one solution and one platform. It's very easy to use from one to the other.

The new data module makes life much easier when you combine it with very complex modules. You can build and combine things very quickly if you need to. You can keep the main organizational data structure and then you can combine it with specific external usage. It's very practical at that level.

It is very important for large organizations to have a secure solution, and this solution is secure. I trust IBM a lot. Having the full web organization structure and organization local modules, you are about to do small operations quickly.

There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos.

That would be nicer if you'd have more charts, the ability to add charts easily. That would be a big improvement. However, the maps have been improved immensely which I am happy with.

Once you put a few requests into IBM for changes, it might take six to 12 months. A lot of the requests are responded to and they upgrade or change the feature. When you make a report and you plan it in advance and you want to have smart dates in your planning, this is a bit limited. It is a small issue and you can work around it quite easily but it would be something they can improve.

If you want to see the new feature in someone else's product it takes time, and for IBM Cognos it is approximately six to 12 months for it to be implemented. The other cloud competitors will have it. 

I have been using IBM Cognos for approximately 18 years.

IBM Cognos is highly stable. This is one of the largest values of the solution.

The solution is highly scalable.

Technical support has been improving a lot over the last two years. I add my questions in an online IBM forum and people from the development have directly contacted me with a solution. I'm really happy with it.

The initial setup of IBM Cognos is complex. It takes time and experience to know how to do it. You can't only install it, there are a lot of things you need to take into consideration before you begin. You have to make sure you have the right hardware specifications, and that you are not conflicting with any firewalls. You can put it on many servers and for large organizations. The solution can handle complex issues that other solutions can't. Most of the smaller products can't handle it. IBM Cognos is efficient at handling multi servers with data coming from many places and organizing it into one place. The implementation can take a long time because the requirements are complex.

The basic setup will take approximately one day. If it is not a basic implementation the time depends on how complex the data is and how much needs to be worked on. For example, on a predefined data warehouse, in which everything has been done, the setup might only be a few hours then you can start working.

It can be between hours and months. It depends on the context of how many databases are being used, fields, and calculations. You can bring 500 tables and none of them are difficult, but then you have one table with three calculations and takes three weeks to build because those calculations are complex. it doesn't matter which tool you use.

The amount of people needed to support the implementation depends on the customer. If it's a small business-sized customer with 10 to 20 users, I can do the implementation by myself. If it's a larger business then sometimes four, five people.

The maintenance can be very minimal because the data structure doesn't change. However, on the other hand, some customers have the requirements over time to change.

IBM Cognos can provide a substantial return on investment but it depends on the implementation and use case. I've been in organizations where I improved delivery from 24 hours to an hour. They had hardware coming in and it took them a long time to process it. I brought in easy-to-use reporting systems, which they could check the inventory coming in and approve it in less than an hour using barcodes. 

The barcode would send the information to the ERP system in a way that was easy for it to receive. However, the process was very slow. We added a few things, and the operation was doing better. If you use it properly, you can improve your business services immensely.

The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product.

I have evaluated other solutions.

I rate IBM Cognos a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are the AI-based questions.

The storyboarding and storytelling features of Cognos Enterprise are both very good.

The solution offers excellent dashboard creation capabilities. I use this extensively.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Overall, there aren't any features that are lacking in the product.

The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution.

I'd like to see more predictive analytics enhancements in future releases.

I've been using this solution for our years now.

The solution is very stable. We don't worry about bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash on us at all. It doesn't freeze. It's reliable.

You can scale the solution if you need to. That's not a problem.

At our organization, we have between 150 and 200 people using it at any given time.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. We found them to be helpful. We've been satisfied with the service provided.

We did use Cognos Express originally. It's built for smaller deployments, and we were on the margins in terms of parameters. In the end, our organization found that it was too small for our needs and we moved up to their Enterprise option.

We also use Phillips and Oracle Business Intelligence as well as Power BI.

The initial setup isn't very complex. It's mostly straightforward. However, due to the setup of our organization and its architecture, we did face a few specific complexities during implementation.

We have seven people who handle the administration as needed.

We had someone who helped us set everything up and provide the required technical training.

We'd like the pricing to be reduced, of course. We'd like to reduce the cost period.

I'm a user, not a vendor or a reseller.

We use the enterprise version of the product.

In terms of BI tools, I'd advise others that this is one of the best. It was easy to use once we had the initial training that is required. The features such as storytelling, AI based sessions, are great. I would recommend it to other companies for sure.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight.