IBM Cognos Reviews

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.

Our primary use cases for IBM Cognos are operational and other reports. 

The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson. 

I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information. IBM Cognos could be improved with some analytical solutions that could help us make predictions.

I have been using IBM Cognos for five years, I think. 

We have 700 individuals using the solution and plan on increasing that number. 

I think the IBM Cognos tech support is good. 

I don't know what the initial setup was like because I wasn't with the company at that time. 

I can't say much about the licensing costs because I am not privy to that information. However, I do know we are sharing a global license. 

On a scale of one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give IBM Cognos a nine for overall performance. 

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.

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 ability to interface with multiple server types (databases) to retrieve data and report on that data in an all-inclusive environment is beyond a doubt the best feature. The reporting interface takes getting used to, but once you familiarize yourself with it, you can create some truly amazing graphical and informational reports.

BI has allowed our product to become open ended as far as the client data is concerned. We have proprietary reporting that is standardized but doesn’t capture everything. BI expands that functionality to include any and all customization a client may have and still get their data.

The GUI for reporting isn’t very user friendly, so beginners struggle with feeling overwhelmed when seeing it for the first few times. I spent my first two years just getting used to where everything was and how to script simple things without looking them up. A better dictionary of examples for functions would have gone a long way with helping me.

They’ve improved it and it’s much better than it was, as well as the tooltips on the page, so I’m thinking they had similar feedback in the past. When I engage new clients on the product, though, they are almost always overwhelmed by the interface and I don’t have a good solution other than redesign. They could create a secondary Page Design pane that is simpler for beginners. They could even merge Query Studio with Report Studio, and as you familiarize yourself with the Query pane and need a little more functionality, you can flip to the Report Studio pane. I would prefer a secondary pane option over an entire redesign since I’m familiar with the current structure.

I’ve used Cognos BI for over seven years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I personally have had no problems with IBM tech support, though my experience is from a reporting standpoint not an implementation standpoint.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The only advice I can give here is that there are several third-party companies that will handle implementation as well as provide continued support post-production. I recommend doing your homework and hiring one of them to take care of implementation and support, if you don’t have a dedicated team to do so internally.

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

There is a huge cost up front to purchase and get it off the ground, but once you have it, you won’t regret it. To have access to all of your data at your fingertips is impressive and I think it’s a must have for medium and large companies (+500 employees).

The most valuable feature is the ability to quickly build cubes with Cognos Transformer. Transformer has enabled us to consolidate millions of rows of detailed data into multi-dimensional cubes. It enable business users to drill down, and slice and dice data by key business dimensions, such as product, region, customer, and time.

It has provided visibility into our customers; specifically, it has given us insight into high-value customers.

The Cognos Suite needs improvement in a number of areas. First, the products must be made more user friendly for casual users. Next, business users need the ability to quickly pull in data from non-structured sources without the need for IT to model the data. Another area for improvement is advanced charting and graphical elements that you can use in reports and dashboards.

I have been using IBM Cognos since 2012.

PowerCubes has limits and thresholds. Developers need to be aware of these when designing a cube, and take into consideration the cube performance versus the physical size.

Report Studio for operational reporting against relational data sources is very dependent on the underlying database performance and the design of your metadata model in Framework Manager. Report designers and modelers must analyze the generated SQL and tune the Framework Model and reports.

The technical support is good.

I did not use any other solution previously.

Setup for a multi-server environment is of average complexity. Tuning the environment takes time.

Negotiate on licensing and support costs.

We have often reviewed the BI landscape. For Enterprise BI, we have looked at Cognos, SAP Business Objects and MicroStrategy. These tools are very similar and leapfrog each other with each release. Newer tools such as QlikView, Tableau, and Spotfire have gained momentum and taken market share from the enterprise BI vendors. You need to analyze your needs and determine whether an enterprise BI suite is right for you, or if you need multiple tools for different capabilities.

Plan your reporting strategy. Do you intended to implement self-service reporting so that end users are creating reports? Do you need structured operational and management reporting? Cognos often requires IT resources for metadata modelling. Will you have the bandwidth and time to move at the speed your business requires?

I use Cognos to design reports.

The storytelling feature is most valuable because it has a more explanatory approach which is really convenient for building up monthly reports with some context. 

The version I last worked on "IBM Analytics" required you to build your own queries and reports for statistical reasons, which should be out of the box rather than requiring users to build them. A nice dashboard showing uptime, runtime per report/user/ query ... usage per report ... for direct publication would be nice to promote the tool at the end users without investing a lot of time in it as an administrator

I've worked with this solution for about 15 years.

Cognos is stable, I've never experienced issues with its stability.

The support isn't bad, but the user community is quite small to discuss certain topics, especially in comparison to those of competitors like Microsoft Power BI.

I've also used Qlik Sense, but I prefer Cognos for the scalability and data structuring on the backend. In the frameworks, you have better data management than in Qlik, which requires you to build independent data models.

The initial setup is quite easy and has improved from previous versions.

I would advise those thinking of implementing Cognos to look at their customers' requests. If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense. I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.