IBM Cognos Reviews

The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly.

I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos.

It is also quite pricey.

I have been using Cognos for about 15 years. I used to work in a company that was a partner of IBM. I was selling this product formally, and I created solutions with it. That was about five years ago, and now, I have started to work with it in another company.

I mostly worked with Cognos. I have worked a bit with Tableau and Microsoft BI.

It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos.

I would rate IBM Cognos a nine out of 10.

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.  

On-premises

Almost all of the features are valuable. We have users who fit into different stacks of reporting capabilities.

Every day-to-day decision is driven by data. With this tool, we are able to provide it to relevant parties. They are happy with the data and the way it is presented.

We have users who can build ad-hoc reports on their own. They don't have to reach out to technical teams. This reduces dependencies and eliminates the turn-around time.

I would like to see more robust scheduling capabilities. Advanced audit information should be readily available, rather than pointing us to use a SDK each time.

We have been using this solution for eleven years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 4/10. IBM technical support should be improved and their turn-around time should be reduced.

We have used in-house tools before. However, we switched to Cognos because we needed something readily available and catered to different user bases.

The installation was pretty straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation that comes with it. It covers everything.

It’s an enterprise tool and different stacks of tools are beneficial for small, medium, or large companies.

We looked into Business Objects, Actuate, and Microsoft SSRS.

You need to know the details of the product to love it. This product caters to all sizes of companies and easily accommodates growing companies. It can be used across an enterprise.

Powerful Report Studio and Event Studio: We have stringent requirements for the reports that go to investors. Report Studio helps us to deliver pixel-perfect reports in both HTML and PDF formats. Event studio is such a powerful tool: We have over 400+ reports going out every day based on different conditions; a few are periodic, a few are based on availability of data, etc. Without Event Studio, it would be a nightmare to maintain these huge jobs.

Even though I identified Event Studio as one of the most valuable features, it still has room for improvement. Sometimes events get stuck; we need to restart Cognos services and do clean up in order to clear the queue. Error messages are not that straightforward.

The other area that needs improvement is Cognos Workspace. When we add multiple reports to the workspace, the performance is not up to the mark.

Another area of improvement is ‘interactivity’. Cognos is not even comparable from the interactivity perspective with other reporting tools such as Tableau.

I have used it for over 7+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Cognos is very scalable. We could have a distributed installation (which we are already using) with multiple content managers and application tier components; we have never faced scalability issues.

I would say technical support is good, not great. We have contacted support for a number of issues. The main thing tech support needed was to replicate the issue at their end, which is not always possible. We still have issues that tech support is unable to address.

We were using Microsoft reporting services as our reporting solution.

Initial setup was quite complex. We started with a single-server installation, and faced performance issues; then, we tried a distributed installation. A distributed installation is quite complex, especially when the requirements are high, such as AD integration, load balancer support, enabling single sign on, etc.

It is a very good product. I feel the price is OK, as it is not just a tool but it is a reporting platform.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options. However, we did evaluate a few others recently for some other requirements. We figured out that MicroStrategy is also at par (or even on a bit higher side in some features), but considering the tradeoff between the features, price and effort to migrate, we felt it is better to go with Cognos.

This is a best-in-class reporting platform. But keeping in mind the high price of this tool, it is better to evaluate it before going for it. You might not need all the features provided by this tool, in which case you end up paying more. Also, it might not be suitable for small firms.

Excellent new functionality.

Replacement for VVM is still giving us issues. Trying to connect to SAP Function Modules is tricky.

I've used Cognos in five projects, including Itaú Bank of Brazil, some Brazilian pharma laboratories, and an insurance company. I also used Cognos for work I did with HBSC Bank of London and another HBSC in Brazil.

It's very fast to access and the security administration is great. You can assign many roles to users. 

I've been using Cognos for 15 years.

The cost of the license is very expensive and it's costly to achieve scalability. For that reason, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are more commonly used in Brazil.

I am an architect who builds solutions. I have 20 years of experience with translating business needs for BI and data warehouse solutions.

We get to create customized solutions for many users. In our organization, we reach 40% of the employees with information from the data warehouse.

• The ability to build solutions that can be changed so that the solution is up to date. The possibility of integrating third parties through HTML and Java code in a supported way. 
• It's possible to add to the role management and security that can be maintained.

• Continue to develop the AI assistant so we can add business logic to the metadata. 
• Ability to insert own graphs in D3 through supported API. 
• Prompting should be better.

More than five years.