IBM Cognos Reviews

Active Reports are valuable for the organization because you can save it with the .mhtm file extension and can open it as an offline report at any time; it does not need an internet connection. Also, it does not need any further customization when you present the report for Cognos mobile, and it's faster.

Creating dashboards for sales and suppliers for about of 1.4 billion EGP of income and about 55 distribution locations

There is room for improvement regarding installation of the visualization plugin for Cognos reports to enhance the colours of your dashboards. There are plugin charts from IBM for Cognos to incorporate Web 2.0 colors into charts and also add some animation. For example, feed-in and feed-out animation to add some action to the report when you open it for first time or when you refresh the report page.

I have used it for about four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. It’s very stable; more so than Oracle BI.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. You can install other software and this product can integrate with it – for example, Cognos Metrics, Mobile, PowerPlay and Transformer. This product can also integrate with IBM FileNet, WebSphere, Cognos Data Manager, and MS SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

Technical Support is very expensive and internet resources for many issues are very poor, similar to QlikView and Pentaho. But I think Oracle OBIEE and MS BIare very good in this area.

I did not previously use a different solution, because the company bought it before I joined.

Installation is straightforward. Configuration is complex if your database is AS/400, but it’s easy if your DB is Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL Server.

I think the price and license cost is very expensive, especially for Oracle BI and IBM Cognos. It’s because here in Arab world, it depends on software houses that work for governmental projects are looking to retain their partnerships with IBM and Oracle.

I think QlikView and SAP BO are better because their licenses are available for about 500$ per user and include two years of support. However, I don’t think the QlikView reporting tool is as good as Oracle and IBM. I don’t know SAP BO because I don’t use it enough to judge it.

I use both solutions IBM Cognos and Oracle BIEE. I use either of them, depending on the business needs.

This product is very useful and good to implement, but you must know that you need good support from IBM, if you face any particular problem.

Report Studio.

Any area for which developer has requirements can be improved, streamlined e.g. Marketing, Compliance, Surveillance, Hotel Accounting, Casino Accounting .

• -Pulling images directly from database with Report Studio
• Graceful ways to consume / report on XML or JSON structure received as a result of API call
• Timely bug fixes

13 years.

I would say IIS configuration is more complex than expected

Possibly but there could be multiple reasons for the environment being unstable especially on virtual servers.

Not really.

It depends on sales rep. It may vary. Judging on we experienced it could be 6-8 on scale 1-10 (10 is the best).

It depends on sales rep. It may vary. Judging on we experienced it could be 6-8 on scale 1-10 (10 is the best).

No previous solution.

The first time ever setup is always more complex. After that it is pretty much "known road." Again, IIS configuration may be more complex than it should.

It has always been in-house implementation.

I do not have answer on this but in some areas it may be very high.

Yes. Business Objects, Crystal Reports (while back).

Go ahead, you will not regret.

I primarily use IBM Cognos for order management.

Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules.

There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data. In the next release, Cognos should include artificial intelligence features.

I've been working with this solution for over eight years.

Cognos' scalability is good.

IBM's support community is excellent, and there's a large knowledge base if we have any problems. When I have a problem, and I reach out to the support team, my problem gets addressed within a couple of days.

Positive

I've also used Tableau and Power BI, but Tableau doesn't support data modeling.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Anybody can learn to use Cognos, but they need some data analytics skills and knowledge of data warehousing, including the complete data pipeline from the source to creating reports. IBM's developer network provides lots of resources for learning this tool and documentation for all versions. I would rate Cognos as seven out of ten.

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.

Reporting, which includes building reports out of relational schema.

This product has made enhancements in building dashboards, incorporated changes to make it easier for the business users to import and use their metadata to do analysis. That is included in Cognos Analytics version 11. It is more user friendly and in some areas, you do not necessarily depend upon IT to build reports. There is one tool like Cognos Workspace Advanced, which is the hybrid of Query, Report and Analysis Studio.

Dashboarding: Actually right now in Cognos 10.2.2, Cognos Workspace is the dashboarding studio to build dashboards. But I believe some work still needs to be done in order to compete with other tools like Tableau, etc.

Tableau has in-memory capabilities and a lot of depth in visualizations. It can analyze and display a lot of intuitive data quicker. Also, Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau. However, the new version, Cognos 11, is a big step in that direction to make it more user friendly.

Dimensional Modeling Reporting: Dimensional Modeling is used for reporting where the reports can be drilled down to a detail level. It works on the same concept as cubes, except it is live. Performance is a big factor, so it requires lot of expertise to build the right kind of model with the proper aggregation level; otherwise, the performance is impacted. Plus, it requires MDX knowledge to enhance/maintain the model, because SQL doesn’t work in dimensional modeling.

I have used it for eight years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I encountered scalability issues when different users are querying at the same time or if one user is running a big report involving large query (SQL).

Technical support is 8/10.

Pricing and licensing is high. It can be lowered.

I didn't make the decision to choose this product.

It is a good product for reporting, not necessarily for dashboards.

The use of the dimensional and relational data model for drill-down, drill-up and drill-through: This is how you can switch between analysis on a high-level, aggregated data and detailed data.

I have been a business intelligence and analytics consultant for 15 years and I have always provided value to my customers.

The improvement to make is for BI to be extended into analytics; more Watson technology in BI. Watson from IBM is for more predictive and prescriptive analysis (big data) and Cognos BI is for more descriptive (BI). When IBM brings the Watson technique into BI, you will have one platform for reporting over past, present and future.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

We have never encountered any stability issues.

We have never encountered any scalability issues.

Over the last 10 years, I have never needed to use the customer support.

Over these 15 years, I have worked with Oracle BI, Microsoft BI, Qlik and several other tools. Beside Cognos, none were compliant enough with the needs of my customers.

Starting with Cognos wasn't easy before the most recent version 11, Cognos Analytics.

Use one of the best BI tools, which Cognos is.

I have rolled into it by starting BI within Cognos.

First look at what you need, before buying a BI tool and implementing it.

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.