IBM Cognos Reviews

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.  

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.

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.

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.

- 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