IBM Cognos Reviews

We analyze data from their marketing campaigns, and social networks in order to determine which campaigns are more effective, and which channels are producing the best results.

It's quite easy to use.  

The tool has a group of algorithms that allows you to find links rapidly.

It is also very easy to create link charts and analytics quickly.

This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats. We don't have any kind of issues with this product.

The online documentation is good, but it could be better. If the documentation could provide more examples, it would be nice.

It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

We are using the Cognos Analytics version.

It's a stable solution. It's very strong. 

With Software Assessment Services, you can forget about the infrastructure. The servers and everything that is related to the typical deployment of the tool is easy because it's on the IBM Cloud.

Your focus your attention on using it instead of the technical side of things.

It is too soon for me to say anything about the scalability, but my impression is that it doesn't matter the amount of data you need to analyze the tool. The background has the infrastructure and the features that allow you to grow according to what you need.

Currently, we have a couple of users but will have five or six more next month. 

The technical support is fast. 

You have access to a knowledge base where you can look for the issue. If you cannot find it, you can contact IBM support and you will get an answer very quickly.

We were working with Power BI on a local deployment, but unfortunately, it suddenly presented some issues. We tried to re-install it but were not successful. To this day, we still don't know why this happened. 

We quickly changed to IBM Cognos and is quite good.

We were also working with Tableau. It's also a local installation. It's very good, very powerful, and has a lot of features you can use to analyze the data. Cognos is easier to use.

The initial setup was extremely easy.

You log in from your account or create an account and instantly you have access to a 30-day trial or you can test the tool, and create exercises to determine if it is good for you. Once complete you can decide if you want to pay monthly or you can dismiss the tool.

In our case, the only thing that we needed to do was to upload the data, which took a couple of hours.

We don't require any staff to maintain this solution.

I don't have this information, it is handled by our finance department. 

It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive.

It's a good idea to take a course online to learn how it works before you start.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for standard reporting in the platform, and we are satisfied with the product.

1. It helps us deliver information to people in different functions. 
2. It is possible to have people make their own reports, so they have service functionality.

A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports. 

We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics.

The latest version is very stable. We have not had any problems.

I have found no problems with scalability. With a good server, everything works.

IBM Cognos can improve in this area. Both IBM and our company do research to find solutions, and we are sometimes faster than they are in providing the solution that works, usually by studying documents. 

We can use the normal routines sufficiently to solve problems. However, if we try to add components which are not streamlined or well-known, we have to work it out without the technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I was not involved in this process. The product was chosen 18 years ago.

We always return to the same vendors, such as IBM, SAP, and Tableau. If there is an existing environment where a lot of reports are outdated, changes need to be made. If we have a running system that is up with no technical problems and the price is not changing drastically, then no change is necessary.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10, because of the support. Other than support, everything works.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: When we search for a vendor, we always make comparisons between them. In France, we were surprised by the product, what it delivers, and what is included in the package. There are a lot of different tools on the market that deliver on some points, but not all.

Cognos Analytics gives us a lot of possibilities, including dashboarding, which you would have to purchase additionally from other providers. Every three or four years, we do some benchmarking to analyze the product.

It is an enterprise solution. It provides scalability, reliability, security, and performance for large scale organizations. Without these features, it would become a useless tool for large organizations.

The tool identifies trends and anomalies before it is too late, i.e., before the end-of-the-year results. This prevents customers from getting angry and provides savings opportunities.

For versions 8 and 10, I would like to see better visualizations and geo-mapping.
Version 10 has out-of-the-box charts and maps that are very outdated, look old, and are static (not interactive).

There seems to have been major improvements on visualizations in Cognos Analytics (Version 11).

I have used this solution since 2001, with versions 6.6.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Sometimes technical support can be hit and miss. However, IBM has some very good technicians.

I used a different solution in a prior organization. They switched from Cognos to Business Objects. The decision was made due to the ERP provider (Epic) having some pre-built BI solutions. In order to keep the certification, my organization had to use their reports.

Cognos has come a long way. Fifteen years ago, the installation and setup was very complicated.

It is not difficult nowadays. However, the tune-up is still tricky.

Clearly define the levels of access and user groups to give access to tools and data. It is hard to change once something is in place.

We are able to combine data from multiple sources across the organization and report on the information as a single source. This allows us to provide insights we could not easily determine before our BI implementation. It is fairly easy to use provided you have a good data structure/framework under the hood.

Our company was able to do a profitability analysis previously unavailable to us due to the nature of our data. We were able to save approximately $650k per year after cutting unprofitable areas of business.

Additionally, Cognos BI provides us "one source of the truth." Everyone uses the same data and can access the same reports, so everyone is on the same page.

The visualizations are nothing flashy, but they can be customized (with some extra work). I think the new version might help a bit with this. Report authoring can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but the new version helps with this as well.

Our company is currently on version 10.2.2, but there is a new version available called Cognos Analytics (aka version 11). We are in the early stages of upgrading to Cognos Analytics. The newer version has an updated interface that looks and feels much more modern. Charts, graphs and other visualizations are fairly basic in both versions, but you can create custom visualizations using JSON thanks to the Cognos Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). I believe Cognos Analytics makes it a bit easier to create and customize RAVE visualizations, but I can’t confirm that because I have not tried it.

In version 10.2.2, Report Studio (used for authoring complex reports) can be a bit overwhelming for new users because of all of the buttons and options available. Cognos Analytics still has all of the buttons and options, but the interface is smarter and more streamlined. You’ll only see relevant options for the part of the report you are developing.

I've used IBM Cognos BI in some form for over 12 years.

The only issues we have ever encountered are in small details like making sure IIS is set up exactly as needed and making sure all of the images/files our company has added or customized are in the correct folder location on the server.

The product is extremely stable. Unless someone develops and tries to run a "runaway" report, we rarely have any stability issues.

We have not had to scale yet.

Customer service has always been responsive and helpful, and most of our tickets have been resolved very quickly.

They are very perficient in their work.

It is pretty straightforward, but it needs to be planned out in detail and executed a few times to make sure there are no hiccups.

I have done both. The original implementation was done by a vendor team (before I was hired), and I have since performed two upgrades myself. The vendor team was capable, but they didn't understand our needs as completely as I have come to know them.

We were able to save in excess of $650k per year using reports created through Cognos BI. In addition, we have achieved significant time savings from many of our end users. That ROI can't really be measured.

Don't hesitate to ask for a better price, especially on new licenses. The more you buy, the steeper the discount that can be offered. Also, it seems like you can get a better deal by going through a third-party vendor than directly through IBM many times.

I am using  IBM Cognos for enterprise reporting.

The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting.

In IBM Cognos it always takes too long to build enterprise reporting, but I don't think that making another product can be solved.

Tableau and PowerBI is a tool, but enterprise reporting is a platform where you put all kinds of information together.

I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page.

I have been using IBM Cognos for many years.

The stability is good.

IBM Cognos is very scalable.

One of our customers has 1,000 users using the solution and 300 unique users every week running reports.

IBM has a good support when you have concrete technical questions.

My company decided to build a data warehouse and they wanted to have the best reporting solution on top of it. That was the reason we are using IBM Cognos.

I started with Portal Play and then moved to IBM Cognos which made the installation straightforward because I have known the history of these solutions and I had a lot of time with it. However, the challenge is to get people to build their own reports and to understand data.

The time for installation depends on a lot of factors. The last time we did an integration with an API, it took five months to build the dashboard, in IBM Cognos it took one hour. It took five months to get the data and one hour to build the dashboard.

We did the implementation ourselves. We used the Azure platform to receive the data from an API and we send it up to IBM Cognos for the database.

For maintenance of the IBM Cognos service, we have one person using 12 days a year, for patching or the install of new releases.

There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost.

My advice is if you are able to solve your problem with an easier tool than IBM Cognos, you should use it. However, if you have a complex problem and you want to distribute a lot of information about the users it is important to get the users to build good reports, then I think is the best tool in the market.

I rate IBM Cognos an eight out of ten.

It has improved things in a lot of areas, such as in better decision making for the company. People are relying more on the reports coming out of Cognos, or a BI tool, rather than their own spec sheets. It gives them time to invest in other activities.

Developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source.

What we have noticed is that it's lacking a few things which we want, especially on the visualization side of things. We want Cognos to improve, IBM to improve. But functionally, it has been working fine.

One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map.

It's a quite stable environment. I have used technical support with the 10.1 version of Cognos, but not with the latest version. Anything after 10.1, it has become a quite stable environment.

Scalability is okay.

We were not using anything previously. We have been with Cognos for a long period of time.

But with the inquiries and the market requirements and the new tools coming into the picture, and the customers who see all these beautiful presentations, they want those tools to be implemented in the company. That's how we started looking into other opportunities.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that the product is scalable, provides ease of use requiring less dependency on IT, and is user-friendly, providing end-users the power to actually create their own dashboards, reports, or any kind of analysis of the fly.

I was hands-on in setting up the environment for our company. It was pretty straightforward. It's a bit fiddly on a few things, if you want some extra components installed, but overall, the basic installation is pretty straightforward.

If you are looking into BI tools, you need to go through how scalable and dynamic the tool will be, and how you're going to actually use it, how the users are going to use the tool in the end. There are various tools on the market. One can do one thing and another can do the other thing. There is not much of a comparison. If you look at Cognos, or if you look at other tools, Cognos is really good when you're looking for credibility of data. But if you're looking at other aspects of usability, then it's not that great. Investigate thoroughly is my advice.

Cognos is an eight out of 10 because it's still lagging behind in some of the capabilities which other BI tools in the market are providing. Images are one of those things. Otherwise, it's really good, it does the job. Still, people have the impression that Cognos still has that dependency on IT.

Cognos contains many components that make up the entire Cognos suite.

The starting point is the meta data designer, which is Framework Manager.

Framework manager allows you to pull in database tables from any type of database, this is referred to as the ‘Database Layer’. Then you create the Business Layer where you update the column names with ‘business names’ and remove the geek speak or database names. You can also include data transformations and table joins in this layer. Finally you create the Presentation Layer that points to the Business Layer. The presentation layer is usually the only layer that is published in the Cognos package.

Cubes contain data hierarchies and time dimensions to allow a report consumer to ‘click and drag’ the data elements that they want to analyze to their reports.

Transformer is the product that allows you to pull large amounts of data together, to allow clients to slice and dice their data any way that they want. Report Studio allows for sophisticated reporting. Each of these is valuable; there is not just one that is more valuable than the other.

We developed sophisticated reports in the fundraising area, which pulls in data from many different databases and presents graphs, charts and summary financial information over any time period that the person wants to see. This set of reports are run or used on average 15,000 times per month by hundreds of end users.

Another example is building financial data using cubes. The cubes contain 11+ years of financial data and we have the add-in for Microsoft Excel, which allows end users to build their own ad-hoc reports for trending and analysis.

Right now, we are in the midst of implementing a brand new version of Cognos, named Cognos Analytics. This version is very, very different from prior versions. We are finding ‘undocumented features’ on a daily basis and reporting issues to IBM. We are working thru the issues, but it is very stressful on us, finding out functionality that was in the previous release but is missing now in Cognos Analytics version 11.

Here are just a few examples of issues that we are facing as of today! We have identified other issues, which have been resolved or we have workarounds.

- In our CA production environment, we imported reporting content that included saved output of financial reports. The saved output did NOT import and therefore users will not be able to pull up the reports in production! This works in our other CA environments, but failing in production!

When you have a saved output report that contains links to drill thru reports and you want to open them in a new browser window, it fails! You have to go in and modify the reports to open in the same window, so now the user cannot see the original report that they clicked on.

You also lose the ability to export reports to Excel or PDF when you have drill thrus to a new window.

If you run a report, have it emailed out and you attach a link to the report in the email, it fails only in our production environment.

The Search and Select prompt fails on the prompt page.

I have used it since 2005, so 11 years now.

The product is stable, but we continue to find issues due to the product’s newness.

The product is very scalable and can support thousands of end users. HUGE companies are using this product.

I rate technical support with a 8-9/10. We occasionally need to escalate issues to senior technical support.

I was an independent consultant and have used competing products; they all have their quirks. Here at the university, we for the most part use Cognos.

The initial setup can be complex for large organizations; for smaller companies, it is easier.

For the university, Cognos is very competitive, because IBM offers huge discounts to higher education. My advice would be to work with an IBM business partner.

Cognos was already installed here when I was hired. The university hired me for my experience.

Hire an experienced business partner, who can provide ongoing support and training.

We use IBM Cognos to help clients with reporting.

Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos.

There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool.

I have been using IBM Cognos for many years.

We have their premier dedicated support. I rate the solution's technical support eight and a half out of ten.

The solution's initial setup is not too bad. We have IBM support if we run into issues.

Overall, I rate IBM Cognos an eight out of ten.