IBM Cognos Reviews

It's performed very, very well. Its primary use is reporting from all our systems.

It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information.

Reliability and strength of product. It's proven to be very robust. It's been great.

I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like. 

Very good. It's very reliable. Very stable. Gives us very little trouble.

Very good. We've been able to add more systems to it and it has no performance problems. We've recently got some guys to rejig it and we've got a lot more performance out of it. We're very pleased. It's clearly an enterprise product.

I haven't used it but the team has. I think they found it very helpful, and got back to them in a reasonable period of time.

We were previously using three or four different solutions. We've had Cognos for 10, 12 years, so it's going back quite a bit of history. But yes, we had different solutions. We're a government organization, so we went out to tender and got Cognos and we're very pleased with the results.

I would certainly give it a nine out of 10, and I could be persuaded to give them a 10. It's very good. Done lots of things we needed it to do, some very, very complex reports. It's been able to develop them. It's delivered them. Very impressed.

Make sure you understand what you want to do with the tool, and make sure you have a good budget to make sure it's successfully implemented.

• Active Reporting: Users can access the reports offline.
• Visualization: IBM Cognos has a variety of charts. It has options to customize any kind of chart using the JSON editor. This helps clients to visualize and analyze the data in a very effective way.

This product has a wide variety of options to present data. The solution has improved our organization in the following ways:

• Builds different kinds of report like lists, crosstabs, and charts.
• Sends the report output to users.
• Offers mobile dashboard options. Client executives and directors can pull the reports to their mobile phones. They can view all kinds of data related to their organization.

I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses.

We have used this solution for over six years.

We sometimes have to restart the application.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I used the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. I switched to IBM Cognos because some of the customization options were not available in that tool.

The installation can be a little complex. It depends on the environment. If it is a Windows environment, the setup will be easy. If it is a Linux environment, it will involve scripting.

If the organization is big enough, I would recommend this product.

We evaluated other options, such as Tableau.

The product has a wide range of data presentation options. If an organization has too much reporting to do, then I would definitely suggest this product.

Cognos includes a framework manager concept that allows you to build a framework model. Once you've built the model, you have to release the package and then it's available for reporting.

Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos.

I have been using Cognos for a few years.

In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager. 

Cognos is scalable.

Installation and configuration-wise, Cognos is more complicated than Tableau and Power BI — it takes more time. You have to install and configure it, then make the data available before you can do reporting. With Tableau and Power BI, the initial setup is very quick; you can just directly connect to Excel or a file on the desktop. Unlike Cognos, Tableau and Power BI eradicate dependency on a framework model. 

Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cognos a rating of eight. 

This is an all-in-one solution that provides reporting for a lot of different reports and visualizations. It provides one tool that works for 90% of situations.

Cognos has a lot of tools such as:

• The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers.
• The Query Studio that is aimed at business users.
• The Event Studio that is used to check conditions before triggering an action.
• The PowerPlay transformer to build cubes.
• The Analysis Studio to report against cubes and others such as planning.

So it covers a lot of the areas that are required for reporting. As far as visualization is concerned, Cognos is trying to keep up with the others. Cognos version 11 has a lot of new charts but still not as good as the other tools that are dedicated for visualization like Tableau, Spotfire etc.

This product has helped to provide basic reporting for reducing manual work as well as some dashboard visualizations for executives to see what's going on in one glance.

Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved. Cognos doesn't have all the charts that are available in the other tools such as Tableau, Spotfire etc. Cognos is trying to keep up with the others and Cognos version 11 has a lot of new charts but still it has a lot of room for improvement.

Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode). I think these are the two main reasons why a lot of companies are using Tableau/OBI/ Spotfire even when they have Cognos.

I have used this solution for eleven years.

Cognos is very stable, after tweaking server settings.

Cognos has different licensing models. PVU license limits CPU and there is need to add that for more users.

It's a mix. Some support agents are very good while some don't have a clue of what's going on.

We did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The basic installation is very easy and you can start reporting.

Make sure to assess the number of concurrent users and the type of users, i.e., studio vs viewers. Also, there is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties.

This product is easy to install and you can start reporting off. However, it needs a lot of tweaking according to the different setups and also has a lot of components that need different skill sets.

It's all consolidated in one solution, so it doesn't have a few things that the other small tools do better.

Cognos is easy to learn and I see a lot of the new consultants in this field, more than in any other BI tool. However, becoming an expert takes a lot of time.

• Data modeling allows for better management and flexibility in exposing data from a single data model to diverse users.
• Flexibility of customization allows for designing custom solutions with ease.
• Scalability: It is very easy to add/remove a node in the Cognos cluster.

We have several reports that users access on a daily basis. We have also created multiple custom solutions to access reports from within an external application, as well as execute and deliver reports in a batch to a network location.

I think that IBM has done a great job with regularly improving this product and keeping up with the competing products. A couple of areas of improvement could be made in alerts for the application monitoring. It is hard to set up alerts when a servicer becomes unresponsive. The other improvement would be in improving the audit capabilities (including the database) of the application. The audit database is somewhat complex in developing good system usage reports.

I have used it for eight years.

I encountered stability issues, but it was more a problem in version 8. Starting from version 10, the stability issues have significantly reduced.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Cognos scales very easily and we have several options for scaling the environment.

Technical support is 6/10, more for the IBM partner from which we purchased the Cognos licenses. The challenge has been that most of the time, when you purchase it through IBM partners, because they are not the developers of the product, they have to go back to the IBM support and get the information and then relay it back to their customers; that adds extra time to solving the problem.

We have used this solution from the beginning, as it was part of the ERP purchase option.

Initial setup was straightforward. Cognos was very easy to install and configure and the documentation provided by IBM was very user friendly.

Cognos licensing is comparable to other competing products. IBM provides several licensing options such as named vs CPU licenses, and it is better to understand the current and future reporting needs before opting for any licensing option.

IBM Cognos was part of the ERP bundle that we purchased. Cognos was part of the package and was sold through an IBM partner.

Understand your current and future BI needs. Understand the information/insight you are looking to get from your BI application. Understand how you would calculate your ROI on your BI investment. Tool selection should be the last step in the development and deployment of any BI environment.

Ability to create canned reports with some ad-hoc capability: Canned reports are important because users are able to get the data they need on a daily basis with minimal effort. However, I have found most people have been downloading the canned reports into Excel and manipulating and adding data. So the ability to have ad-hoc reporting would enable users to get at the information easier, as well as have control over what information they pull. We can provide data quality and integrity on their data sources which they would not get from pulling data randomly.

We are able to launch Cognos reporting across thousands of stores and have them access the status of their stores and products.

I would like to have the ability to drill down to the lowest level of granularity and still do it with speed. Cognos is unable to get down to the lowest level of grain in our data. The solution slows down to an unreasonable level or completely comes to a halt. So if the lowest level of grain is a single customer order or serial number level amongst millions of data points, we are forced to use other solutions to get at that data.

Also, Cognos has no ability to integrate with other reporting solutions.

I have used it for three years.

We have encountered stability issues; every so often, Cognos will hang and needs to be reset.

We have encountered scalability issues, depending on the hardware that the system runs on.

IBM’s technical support is fine.

I did not previously use a different solution; we have been using Cognos.

The complexity of initial setup depends on the hardware platform used and the level of skill of IT.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Tableau, SAP BOBJ, Qlik, and OBIEE.

Understand what level of granularity the users need and the speed of reporting. There may be other solutions that are better. Also, be aware that Cognos is not able to integrate with tools such as Tableau and many reporting solutions that would improve the product. So, you are pretty much stuck with the tools IBM provides.

The Reports and Query Studio functions have been very valuable.

It enables me to see trends of data we have from different angles and each end-user can run ad-hoc queries themselves.

Framework Manager, Map Manager, and Reporting Database Connectivity features should all be free.

3 years including previous version

I was unable to use oracle 64 bit client to connect with oracle 64 bit databases. However, because of Linux I had to use 32 bit anyway.

Not much

We had some minor issues with scalability.

7-8 out of 10

8 out of 10

We changed because of the offer of more features and technical support than our previous solution.

For us it was complex to do it for the first time and too much R&D had to be done. Later on it was easier. It may have been complex as it was our first time setting up the Cognos.

Implementation was done by an In-house team who learned from scratch.

Good. It helped the purpose for which we used it.

I have little knowledge of this but I think we pay for each report we deploy

We looked at three other solutions, Netezia, Xplore, and Netcool.

Go for it but it will require training.

- We have worked with several reporting software products, and Cognos has a lot of flexibility and is very usable. It will perform most tasks that you would need.

Cognos software accesses several data sources and runs on major IBM platforms to help your business get the consistent data it needs. Also, Cognos software provides native interfaces to major ERP and legacy systems for fast access.

Cognos can improve in some data base basic connections (should be easier) mainly migrations in version 7.x to 8.x 10.x

No, because the Cognos platform has a number of features that are designed to ease administration and deployment, enhance performance, enable scalability and reduce the complexity of your BI environment.

No, scalability its very easy

IBM support is very expensive. However, there are many online materials to improve your skills, as well as other consultancies beyond IBM.

Yes, but these applications should not necessarily be changed. Home applications or simple BI tools can and should be used along with Cognos as most simple applications are not competitors. Many are even complementary.

Not very simple. It's important to get the advice of a qualified professional.

Yes, we should always be looking at other solutions in the market and competitors, it is mandatory, like TCO analysis.

2. Draw up a clear and effective communication with both the technical part and the internal and external staff