IBM Cognos and MicroStrategy are two leading products competing in business analytics and intelligence solutions. While both offer robust capabilities, MicroStrategy appears to have a slight edge due to its extensive handling of large data volumes and mobile BI features.
Features: IBM Cognos is known for its wide array of analytic capabilities, user flexibility, and robust security. It offers a suite of tools like Report Studio and Query Studio, which are particularly appreciated for building complex reports effortlessly. MicroStrategy stands out with its advanced data exploration capabilities, excellent mobile BI solutions, and robust metadata architecture that supports large-scale analysis.
Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos could enhance its data visualization capabilities and user interface simplicity. It also needs to improve in handling large data sets and advancing mobile reporting features. MicroStrategy requires improvements in user-friendliness, customization of visualizations, and simplifying deployment processes.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos supports primarily on-premises deployment but also offers private cloud capabilities. Its customer service, although responsive, can be slow with complex issues. MicroStrategy provides flexible deployment options, including on-premises and cloud. Despite the high cost of support, a wealth of online resources and a helpful community mitigate this to some extent.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos is seen as expensive, appealing mainly to large enterprises. Negotiating pricing and utilizing IBM's flexible licensing can lead to a significant ROI if the solution is fully utilized. MicroStrategy also has high licensing costs but offers scalability and a comprehensive feature set, potentially providing a lower total cost of ownership in the long run. However, justifying the initial investment without clear long-term benefits can be challenging.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
I would rate the technical support from MicroStrategy as nine out of 10.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
I would rate the stability of MicroStrategy as nine out of 10.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
Organizations that are well-established and have more money can afford MicroStrategy, but startups and mid-level organizations who do not have this much budget have to opt for other cheaper tools.
MicroStrategy could learn from Power BI's user-friendly interface.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis in my experience are the security, the metadata management, and the administration, along with the options of different workarounds available to accommodate different types of requirements.
The MicroStrategy interface is not as good as Power BI, especially concerning the user-friendly aspects.
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.
IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.
IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.
Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”
Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Product portfoilio:
MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.
Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.
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