IBM Cognos vs Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

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:

• IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

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.”

Oracle OBIEE (Oracle Business Information Enterprise Edition) is a business intelligence (BI) tool developed by Oracle. OBIEE will gather, store and analyze an organization's network data and compile the information to create reports, dashboard graphs, and performance analysis. OBIEE’s unique platform allows clients to discover new awareness and improve the speed of completing important business decisions by providing robust visual tools and intuitive realization coupled with the latest unmatched enterprise analytics available. OBIEE helps IT enterprise organizations to experience an intelligent view of all enterprise data from across all sources and empowers trusted users with increased levels of reliable, dependable access, interaction, and the ability to utilize the data to increase the overall effectiveness and productivity of the organization.

OBIEE provides unique immediate mobile access, intuitive dashboards, robust reporting, real-time alerts, metadata search, procedure management, direct access to Big Data resources, enlightened in-memory computing, and seamless systems management processes. These features seamlessly combine to make Oracle OBIEE a complete, top-of-the-line broad solution that is cost-effective, minimizes TCO, and provides a competitive, quick ROI for the entire organization.

Oracle OBIEE Top Features 

• Complete comprehension: Oracle OBIEE offers a full range of BI strategies, including intuitive smart dashboards, dynamic alerts and detection, efficient workflows, enterprise reporting, MS Office integration, real-time predictive analysis, and more. OBIEE also includes many next-generation options, including mission critical scalability and performance, diverse data access and integration, and a modern, robust, service-oriented architecture.
  

• Hot-pluggable: OBIEE will take advantage of existing IT relationships, both Oracle and non-Oracle databases, solutions, and applications. Organizations that partner with OBIEE have access to an entire library of analytic tools that are immediately deployable and provide an improved TCO and a super-fast ROI. Additionally, in an outstanding collaboration with Hyperion, OBIEE incorporates BI tools that integrate well with the current suite to supply the grandest selection of BI tools available on the market today.
  

• Extensive: OBIEE is very user-friendly and extremely intuitive, and the 100% Web UI brings robust and dynamic BI from diverse sources to any audience, distributing awareness when and where users require it to manage activities, decisions, and processes. 

Reviews from Real Users

Sandeep V., Process System Engineer at a comms service provider, tells us, “This solution is very easy for people who are building ad-hoc things. It's an enterprise solution so it can be deployed for a lot of users. There are some great new features that come with the 12c like data visualization, desktop BI Publisher, automation, and interactive dashboards. The product has good features. “ 

A user who is a CEO at a consultancy relates, “The most valuable feature is the visualization. The data warehousing, data storage, and data wrangling are all features that are in there, and it's one of the better products out there. A good thing is that for large datasets, it's very stable, especially when you have an Oracle database.”

A user who is a Principal Business Intelligence Architect at a computer software company suggests, "It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market."

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.

The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features

• Central management: Access all your BI from a single, central launchpad that can be customized to meet user-specific needs. The launchpad provides business users with access to all their BI tools, reports, notifications, and applications in a single place. This includes the ability to launch SAP Analytics Cloud.
  
  
• Data visualization and analytics: Create powerful visualizations, dashboards, and applications to assess risk, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and enable users to analyze developments and data. Business insights can be shared with colleagues across enterprises.
  
  
• Integration with Microsoft Office: Integrate with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA to power real-time analytics. For large-scale data analysis, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel to discover in-depth business insights and forecasts. Data analytics information can also be embedded into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
  
  
• Cloud support: Extend and expand your BI on the cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud connects your BI to the cloud and offers enterprise planning and advanced analytics from a single online solution.

Reviews from Real Users

SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.

A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."

An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."

A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. It has great visualization.