IBM Cognos Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is reporting and analytics.

This solution has helped us in the distribution of reporting content to one hundred and fifty users. It has also helped in the management of self-service BI.

The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility).

This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how.

It is a quick solution and has dynamic insights. The features that I liked about the system are:

• An easy creation of dashboards with insights. The dashboards that are created, are simple for data representation. Thus, the comparisons are quite user-friendly.
• A user-friendly table structure.
• Being able to create data drill up and down quite quickly. Drilling data down and up helps to understand the insights quickly. For example, in order to analyze the sales data, we get total sales-> region-wise sales-> country-wise-> district-wise-> and store-wise. Reversely, in order to understand the product performance, we would require a drill up chart, i.e., performance at the zonal level-> country level-> overall performance.

The organization was able to:

• Reduce the reporting efforts by 50%.
• Have more insightful reports.

I find areas where some improvements will help are:

• When the data becomes very voluminous, then handling and representing it becomes clumsy.
• The type of charts are only two dimensional. Currently, the charts are two dimensional to understand the trend. Also, one needs to compare the time horizon or the volume horizon separately and it will be really helpful, if that dimension could be included.
• The reporting output/UI is quite old-fashioned.
• The statistical insights are missing or they cant be created.

I have used this solution for two years.

There were no issues in regards to the scalability.

The technical support is average.

One of the reasons why we switched solutions was due to the maintenance cost and the cost of ownership.

We looked at other solutions, namely SAP and TIBCO Spotfire.

• Advanced, enterprise-level data modelling
• Reporting
• Request routing
• Integrated security
• Auditing
• Jobs and scheduling
• Alerts and agents
• Content distribution

Centralised, balanced, scorecard-based dashboards with drill-through to detailed OLAP; datawarehouse; and operational reports keep the organisation focused on KPIs.

It is struggling to compete with the front-end ease of use and visual appeal of QlikView and Tableau.

I have used it for 14 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good (7/10).

I did not previously use a different solution.

It is a mature, full-featured enterprise product and as such requires detailed configuration/administration knowledge to set up.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated SQL Server Reporting Services, Tableau, and QlikView.

It provides value for larger enterprises.

The molap cube file is valuable.

We shared the molap cube file, which means can do analyses on their desktop.

Cognos is a good product with bad performance. We had licenses for all the features but users almost exclusively used the molap cube file.

I've used it for 12 years, since v7.

It has poor integration with other IBM products. In v7 (not in the IBM family), I overrode their upfront UI to integrate it into a websphere portal. In earlier versions, I still find these kinds of problems.

Almost all the time, we have a problem with Cognos stability and even our maintenance vendor can’t do anything to resolve it.

I think Cognos have problem with their dispatcher performance. In v7, I overrode their impromptu options, to catch performance requirement, while in v8, again, I had to override their dispatcher management with our code. Finally, in v10, we didn’t make any changes to improve Cognos, and now our users leave it.

It's good.

We are more expert than they are.

We used Infobeacon and now we are using Cognos and Microsoft BI. We are currently looking for a better product and are evaluating Tableau.

In 2003 It was very complex, and we must survive by ourselves because we can’t find any technical support for us.

We always implemented it through a vendor, but until now, we are more expert than they are.

We evaluated Microstrategy as another option.

Quality of data, flexibility and the performance of the tool(s) are the critical aspects of BI. Test the critical aspects by doing a proof of concept using a huge amount of data.

FM – though it lacks some of the previous version's features: dimensional and sorting.

We're thinking about a different product.

There are a number of things, but I would start with just a few...

Framework Manager:

1. Query subjects sorting in a model are absent.
2. DMR model in FM is currently decommissioned, but basically needed.
3. Cubes – requires my time to explain, but cannot work properly with a big dimensions.

I've used this solution for three years.

Yes.

Yes.

Bad.

Not applicable.

Some issues, though not many.

Not matching the product quality.

Started working with what was used by the organization.

If you choose a Cognos product, be aware to wait until at least the second or third fixpack appears.

Cognos Analytics, or CA for short, is an enterprise level reporting platform. At the most basic level you can use it to build reports. But taking a broader look allows you to see that it covers a vast amount of ground through many different modules.

The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools.

Framework Manager allows you to build relationships between physical database tables, and even a ROLAP solution. Great for detailed or minor aggregation.

Transformer is a basic cube modeling software. Best for building dimensional models over smaller datasets (a few dozen GB), it works extremely well.
Dynamic Cubes is a more advanced ROLAP solution that has intelligent aggregate, query, data, and result set caching. In my experience this works best with larger data, in the TB or PB ranges.

Data Modules. This is an advanced user level modelling. It allows end users to build and cache datasets which they can then use in ad-hoc dashboards and reports.

On the reporting side it, again, has a few tools.

Report Studio is the professional reporting environment. This allows BI Developers to create advanced reports, dashboards, analytical applications. While it does take some training, the effort is well worth it.

Dashboards work against the data modules. T allows advanced users to work with the data modules they've built previously to build dashboards. Users can quickly drag in fields directly onto the canvas to make graphs, prompts, data grids. Interactivity is automatically defined (but can be defined manually) to allow users to filter one group of objects by clicking on another.

Story is a tool used to create presentations. You can use elements from other reports to make a slide show or "guided journey".

There are a few other tools, like Event Studio which can be set to automatically perform actions based on query outputs. There is a graph building tool that allows you to build graphs that developers can use in their reports.

As a consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with a very wide range of clients with very specific needs. So far, Cognos has not failed to meet their needs, and surpass their expectations. The beautiful thing about Cognos is its flexibility.

One client, a government research organization, uses the tool to track specific incidents. When certain criteria occur, specific reports should be emailed. An SMS should be delivered. The researchers needed to be able to view the incidents from as many different perspectives as possible, and quickly go from one perspective to another without losing the context. Dynamic filtering and linking prevailed here.

Another client wanted to expose Cognos to the general public, embedding report outputs in their own portal system. This required a heavy security presence, with redundant levels of data and object security. Even if a report developer did leave a hole in the report, malicious end-users would never be able to get any data they weren't permitted to see. Cognos withstood the probing of professional pen-testers with admirable results.

As with all products, I have run into bugs; some severe enough to derail the project until IBM provided a patch. IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner. Fortunately, show-stopping bugs are few and far between.

I have worked with IBM Cognos for many years, across several different product versions. The most recent being IBM Cognos Analytics 11.6.

Cognos presents interesting scaling opportunities. Additional servers can be loaded and unloaded as needed, and there are many ways of routing report runs. For larger organizations, it's possible to optimize report runs by having one branch of an organization always run reports from a single server.

Support is not cheap, and consultants (hello!) generally charge a few appendages. This is, of course, a matter of getting what you pay for.

The best piece of advice I can give to companies considering Cognos is to factor in the cost of training or consultants. Cognos, despite what some sales people may say, is not an easy tool to start with. It requires a hefty amount of investment to implement. But with proper training, and working with the tool's strengths, the return is well worth the price.