IBM Cognos Reviews

• Scheduling options
• Bursting (each staff member gets feedback regarding their own duty shifts): We might have hundreds of report recipients who need to have their own data (and only their own data). Doing similar work manually would take very long time, or could be impossible. I guess Cognos Burst was originally designed for large sales organisations, having a need to send sales figures for certain sales reps. For example: sales rep in Asia needs his/her figures (Asia), Europe rep European figures, etc. This functionality can be used for, e.g., staff performance, as long as the data can be joined with staff IDs. In other words, with Cognos Burst, we are able to provide personalised reporting / analytics, without manual work.
• Possibility to save report output history to the Cognos portal
• Possibility to use the same report object for various outputs (e-mail, Cognos workspace = dashboard, screens)

It results in less manual work, process performance improvement and improved real-time data availability.

It is also possible to check the report utilisation via Cognos audit reports.

The tool is complex, and I would not recommend it to small companies, because you need to have expertise for Framework Model development, access rights issues, licensing, etc.

New functions, e.g., external data import, do not work as smoothly as they should. New visualisations using RAVE take a long time.

Unfortunately statistics are not available for Cognos 10.2 (as in 10.1), and that has been a disappointment, when Lean Six Sigma-type calculations are done.

Additionally, even after four years of using Cognos, it is sometimes difficult to understand how the tool works, e.g., which calculations are processed locally, etc.

I have used Cognos 10.2 for one year and Cognos 8.4 for three years.

We encountered stability issues, but most likely related to our network and AD issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

From IBM, technical support is OK; other domestic service providers also work OK, but their hourly rates are high!

Finnair has been using IBM tools for a long time, but I personally have used other SQL tools.

Our IT department has taken care of this, thus I do not know.

If you need to send scheduled reports to third parties, you need to have a PVU server.

We have had PoCs regarding QlikView, SAS Visual Statistics, Tableau, etc.

Appropriate data modelling is a must, if you want to increase self-service.

Itis easy to use, and web based.

With BI in place, our staffing department is able to review staff assignment and quickly adjust resources in near real time.

There is room for improvement with the GUI. The product is a web-based application; it is easy to build basic style. However, at a certain level, it lacks support for advanced web programming capabilities, such as JavaScript, Ajax, etc.

I have used it for 12 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The product is built to be an enterprise solution.

Technical support is 8 out of 10. The product has quite a few components. When issues arise, it is not very straightforward to identify root cause, thus difficult to find right support resources for help. My personal experiences are, if you know where the issue occurs and ask the right question, IBM tech support typically can get the answer for you very quickly. Otherwise, it might take some time to get things straightened out.

Other tools were used before, but Cognos provides better functionalities.

It was easy to set up; good documentation.

Cognos offers middle-market and enterprise solutions. The middle market is a great value package for companies with less than 500 users.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated OBIEE and SAP Crystal Reports.

• Understand your needs first.
• Bring in good experts for initial implementation.
• Gradually grow internal resources to be able to do self-support.

• Ease of use
• Reliability of product
• Ability to build models with Framework Manager
• Cube build utility
• Ability to build prompt pages for on-demand reporting
• Report distribution facilities: ease of providing multiple report outputs and to write those report outputs to the file system

We use it mainly to augment / replace the reporting deficiencies in the reporting tools that ship with the vendor products.

This is an easy one: visualizations. While being able to use them to provide client-side filtering in Active reports is great, they are so far behind the functionality offered in the basic Cognos charts, it is almost laughable that they even offer them in the product. As the legacy charting has all the functionality I need, I know they can see how far behind the visualizations are, but still have done nothing to improve that part of the product. Filtering client side allows me to offer much more data to the client, but without decent charting it is not very useful.

I have used it for 10+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. It pretty much just runs every day. I reboot the report server maybe once every two months, but it is rarely ever necessary. This is one of the big selling points for me.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. I put a lot of thought and effort into report run times. The biggest problems with scalability are usually with concurrency, so I endeavor to limit this.

I rarely use technical support.

The organization switched from Crystal Reports to Cognos. Crystal Reports is just a poor version of Cognos in my opinion.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. Initially, we had the Content Manager and the report server on the same box, but moving the Content Manager to a SQL server box and having the report server on its own box really helped performance.

I do not like the PVU licensing model. It is nice to not have to worry about handing out individual licenses, but I feel it is terrible to then be limited to the hardware you licensed at the time. I think it is easier to charge business units for adding new users rather than trying to get a big chunk of money all at once to upgrade the hardware.

Spend a lot of time on your data model and then the Framework Manager model before starting any reporting. Also, before starting any reporting, set up report templates both for the prompt page and for the report page. Adding in a table, hidden with a conditional style, to track report changes is a good idea.

Our primary use for the solution is just pure BI (Business Intelligence) delivery.  

After centralizing the data, the people using the product have the ability to view all the numbers through one single platform. It is also providing them the information they need in order to make their business decisions.  

Cognos has a drag-and-drop interface for selecting packages to use in creating their own ad hoc reports and this makes it very easy to use. A second thing that is valuable is the way that it allows you to customize the security.  

So far we do not have any issues with the functionality. The cost per year could be improved. They are the leader in the industry and they charge a lot. If you are the end-user and you want to work with the leader you cannot complain about the cost and you have to pay for it.  

If they were going to make improvements, I would say that they could do more related to big data. I think they were lacking in the initial phases of development in this area. I am not sure if they may have addressed these concerns already because I have not seen their new capabilities in more recent releases. But initially, it was lacking strength in the area of big data.  

I have been using this product since I joined this company is 2013. So I have been using it for about seven years.  

We have been running the Cognos environment from 2013 onward. In that time, I have never seen a single instance of it going down. The small bugs come and go just like that. There have been a few small bugs, but never anything that was around for long. Even a product like Microsoft which has tremendous development resources is releasing monthly patches. Every product will have small issues.  

We currently have mostly data management people using the product and that is a total of about 200 people using the reports.  

In my lifetime, I have never had to call technical support for Cognos. That is from my experience. I never had any issue that was too difficult to deal with myself and I never needed to go to them directly. I have no first-hand experience with support. It probably suggests something about the quality of the product if in seven years you never have to consult the company for technical support.  

We have not switched. We chose it because it was the industry leader in this category. It was our initial selection and we never went back.  

The setup is straightforward. If the organization has a very complex architecture, I would say it might take many months to implement it properly. But setting up the environment is normally just a couple of hours or maybe a day or two of work. Generally, I would say it is easy to do the initial setup. It was easy for us.  

I think as per my understanding, everyone has their own criterion and measure for the way a product fits into their scenario. If they have the resources and can budget for the investment in this product and if they have the kind of infrastructure that warrants the investment, definitely to go for this product. If the business or user has budget constraints, I would say there are a lot more other options. It comes down to the capabilities of the different solutions and how they satisfy user needs.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product a seven-out-of-ten. I keep three points back because I feel that in being a leader, they are missing some of the functionality that they should have already which is somewhat basic. Everything it should be supporting is not there. Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say.  

New project to leverage enterprise-wide reporting and analytics. Serving as a standard report and application needs as well as any self-service BI needs.

Numerous large data sets (more than 150 MIO records) are in the data warehouse, self-service BI required (self-serve analysis), Netezza as back-end and Cognos Analytics 11 as front-end.

• Extremely fast solution using IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes. Aggregate aware querying providing a fast-on-fast solution (in combo with Netezza). In addition, the interactive viewer of Cognos Analytics and dashboards provide for a unprecedented experience of key users with their data, enabling them to change visualizations on the fly, applying different sorts, filters, etc. This enables them to do further analysis than what is possible with a predefined application.
• Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive.
• Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.
• Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc.

• Dynamic Cubes provide fast analytics through aggregate awareness querying on aggregate, fact tables.
• Dashboards providing an easy interface to build interactive dashboards. 
• Watson Analytics suggests visualizations, which helps users to build visualizations for data exploration.
• Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers.
• Interactive viewer enabling live interaction with standard reports, filtering, sorting, changing visualizations, etc.

• Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool.
• Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures (also being aggregate aware).

Response times should fall in seconds, not minutes. Visualizations should be strong. System should be capable of guiding users in their data exploration.

• The solution is very flexible, but IT oriented.
• It is an enterprise level solution for BI that holds value in a traditional BI sense.
• It is a full platform that is designed for the full cycle (data warehousing to pixel perfect reporting).
• It provides a managed IT environment.
• It does not excel in any one specific area, such as in visualization. However, there appears to be a lot of development with complementary products such as Watson Analytics and TM1.

We have been able to provide managed data sources and packages to end users. They can use this content to do their own reporting without IT assistance.

It is similar to a competency center, in which IT will help resolve or work on complex requirements or projects.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Tools: Dashboards, visualizations, and the simplification of the available tools
• Licensing: It is very difficult to know which studio needs to be passed to which users or projects. This is because licensing and tools are confusing and they overlap with one another. Even for OLAP, there are issues with transformers, TM1, dynamic cubes, and compatibility with other vendors’ cubes.
• Simplicity: There are CQM and DQM modes, so it can become very technical.
• Consistency: They made a decision to deprecate Query Studio and migrate to Workspace Advanced. However, that did not happen. They wanted to push the new version which will deprecate Workspace Advanced as well.

Basically, Cognos has been a traditional BI platform. Lately, there has been a trending push for more of a modern BI approach that is heavier on the self service side. This approach does not care for the whole cycle of waiting on a request to go through the IT development chain in order to make it happen for the end user.

I have used it for about nine years. My company has been using it for about six years.

We are on Linux, so we rarely have stability issues. We could run into resource issues, but that would be space or hardware related.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. Cognos is very good at scaling.

Vendor technical support could be improved. It used to be really great. However, it seems like the focus now is on newer development. The support may not be that good for the more difficult issues.

When I came here, they did not have another solution. In my past environment, they had Business Objects, but ended up switching to Cognos for the flexibility it provides.

If you are doing a standalone installation, then the initial setup is easy.

However, if you get into a distributed environment and load balancing, then it requires you to really know the application well. You need to know about the server level for all of the configurations.

Licensing has been simplified over the years. However, we do not like their Processor Value Unit (PVU) model and prefer the named user licensing route.

Pricing can be expensive depending on the number of administrators or developers. Regular consumer licenses do not cost as much. They also have a cloud solution.

If implementing on-site, you will need to have skilled administrators and developers who are experienced with this solution. They are in demand, so they will command a high salary.

We are a solution provider. We come up with the business requirements for our clients, and then we provide a complete solution for catering to their specific needs.

We come up with a customized BPM or a BA or another analytical solution and we offer them as a package. 

IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions. You have Report Studio and Analytics Studio, where they have different tools for designing reports. These include report templates and comping up with canned reports.

The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved. The way they have designed the framework, the framework manager is a critical part. If you have a properly-designed framework manager then whatever stories you generate through the Report Studio or Query Studio will give you better results. However, if the modeling is incorrect then it will kill your free memory and detract from the performance.

You have to have complete control of the data model, including the hierarchy and the relationships. There are still a lot of loose ends. The way that a many-to-many relationship can be defined within the framework should be brought into the Report Studio and Query Studio. This would be an improvement. 

There can be a recursive effect, where you are pulling resources away from the users. This will eat away the resources and cause them a lot of lag time in their reporting.

We have been working with IBM Cognos for almost 25 years, since 1996 or 1997. 

The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises. These higher licensing costs are why we recommend Pentaho or Talend for the SME segment. For them, they have to minimize the total cost of ownership. This segment is also interested in open-source enterprise solutions, which will reduce their costs to a large extent.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to ensure that they are clear with the business requirements. You have to define the model in the first place, so you want to design the model with all of the business hierarchies and attributes so that there will be no further re-working it, or any re-production of work in the future. This means that you have to plan your model, get a model, and then framework manage your model well in advance. Then your reporting and analytics will be very good.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it as our main reporting tool for implementing BI solutions. We have been using the whole Cognos suite for a while now.

The upgraded visualizations and more user-friendly interface have increased the acceptance rate of this tool.

• Ability to connect to a number of databases
• Framework manager modelling
• Data modules
• Building ad hoc reports from CSV files.

The latest visualization doesn't give much flexibility to the users in terms of what can be changed. For example, there are fixed palettes. The dashboard interface needs tremendous improvement as it's not very fast as compared to Tableau and the likes.