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.

• ETL
• A lot of features
• Performance

These are important to big clients with big data.

For our clients, this product helps them make decisions faster, based on high-quality data.

The new version’s web interface isn't easy to use by 'regular' users. You must have technical skills to build reports. The product is not like QlikView or Tableau, where 'regular' users can build their reports on their own.

I have used it for four years.

I have encountered a few stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex; many servers.

It is expensive.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated MicroStrategy and SQL Analysis Services.

You need an IT team to support the users. It is not a BI-as-a-service app.

Itis easy to use, and web based.

With BI in place, our staffing department is able to review staff assignment and quickly adjust resources in near real time.

There is room for improvement with the GUI. The product is a web-based application; it is easy to build basic style. However, at a certain level, it lacks support for advanced web programming capabilities, such as JavaScript, Ajax, etc.

I have used it for 12 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The product is built to be an enterprise solution.

Technical support is 8 out of 10. The product has quite a few components. When issues arise, it is not very straightforward to identify root cause, thus difficult to find right support resources for help. My personal experiences are, if you know where the issue occurs and ask the right question, IBM tech support typically can get the answer for you very quickly. Otherwise, it might take some time to get things straightened out.

Other tools were used before, but Cognos provides better functionalities.

It was easy to set up; good documentation.

Cognos offers middle-market and enterprise solutions. The middle market is a great value package for companies with less than 500 users.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated OBIEE and SAP Crystal Reports.

• Understand your needs first.
• Bring in good experts for initial implementation.
• Gradually grow internal resources to be able to do self-support.

We are able to combine data from multiple sources across the organization and report on the information as a single source. This allows us to provide insights we could not easily determine before our BI implementation. It is fairly easy to use provided you have a good data structure/framework under the hood.

Our company was able to do a profitability analysis previously unavailable to us due to the nature of our data. We were able to save approximately $650k per year after cutting unprofitable areas of business.

Additionally, Cognos BI provides us "one source of the truth." Everyone uses the same data and can access the same reports, so everyone is on the same page.

The visualizations are nothing flashy, but they can be customized (with some extra work). I think the new version might help a bit with this. Report authoring can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but the new version helps with this as well.

Our company is currently on version 10.2.2, but there is a new version available called Cognos Analytics (aka version 11). We are in the early stages of upgrading to Cognos Analytics. The newer version has an updated interface that looks and feels much more modern. Charts, graphs and other visualizations are fairly basic in both versions, but you can create custom visualizations using JSON thanks to the Cognos Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). I believe Cognos Analytics makes it a bit easier to create and customize RAVE visualizations, but I can’t confirm that because I have not tried it.

In version 10.2.2, Report Studio (used for authoring complex reports) can be a bit overwhelming for new users because of all of the buttons and options available. Cognos Analytics still has all of the buttons and options, but the interface is smarter and more streamlined. You’ll only see relevant options for the part of the report you are developing.

I've used IBM Cognos BI in some form for over 12 years.

The only issues we have ever encountered are in small details like making sure IIS is set up exactly as needed and making sure all of the images/files our company has added or customized are in the correct folder location on the server.

The product is extremely stable. Unless someone develops and tries to run a "runaway" report, we rarely have any stability issues.

We have not had to scale yet.

Customer service has always been responsive and helpful, and most of our tickets have been resolved very quickly.

They are very perficient in their work.

It is pretty straightforward, but it needs to be planned out in detail and executed a few times to make sure there are no hiccups.

I have done both. The original implementation was done by a vendor team (before I was hired), and I have since performed two upgrades myself. The vendor team was capable, but they didn't understand our needs as completely as I have come to know them.

We were able to save in excess of $650k per year using reports created through Cognos BI. In addition, we have achieved significant time savings from many of our end users. That ROI can't really be measured.

Don't hesitate to ask for a better price, especially on new licenses. The more you buy, the steeper the discount that can be offered. Also, it seems like you can get a better deal by going through a third-party vendor than directly through IBM many times.

• Ease of use
• Reliability of product
• Ability to build models with Framework Manager
• Cube build utility
• Ability to build prompt pages for on-demand reporting
• Report distribution facilities: ease of providing multiple report outputs and to write those report outputs to the file system

We use it mainly to augment / replace the reporting deficiencies in the reporting tools that ship with the vendor products.

This is an easy one: visualizations. While being able to use them to provide client-side filtering in Active reports is great, they are so far behind the functionality offered in the basic Cognos charts, it is almost laughable that they even offer them in the product. As the legacy charting has all the functionality I need, I know they can see how far behind the visualizations are, but still have done nothing to improve that part of the product. Filtering client side allows me to offer much more data to the client, but without decent charting it is not very useful.

I have used it for 10+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. It pretty much just runs every day. I reboot the report server maybe once every two months, but it is rarely ever necessary. This is one of the big selling points for me.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. I put a lot of thought and effort into report run times. The biggest problems with scalability are usually with concurrency, so I endeavor to limit this.

I rarely use technical support.

The organization switched from Crystal Reports to Cognos. Crystal Reports is just a poor version of Cognos in my opinion.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. Initially, we had the Content Manager and the report server on the same box, but moving the Content Manager to a SQL server box and having the report server on its own box really helped performance.

I do not like the PVU licensing model. It is nice to not have to worry about handing out individual licenses, but I feel it is terrible to then be limited to the hardware you licensed at the time. I think it is easier to charge business units for adding new users rather than trying to get a big chunk of money all at once to upgrade the hardware.

Spend a lot of time on your data model and then the Framework Manager model before starting any reporting. Also, before starting any reporting, set up report templates both for the prompt page and for the report page. Adding in a table, hidden with a conditional style, to track report changes is a good idea.

It has the ability to model OLTP data sources with Framework Mgr. instead of building a data warehouse. Building a Framework metadata model takes weeks, while building a data warehouse takes 12-24 months.

The Framework model won't perform as fast as a properly designed and optimized DW, but it will give you accurate results with a much lower investment. Then, when your company is ready to invest in the DW, it can take the structure of the Framework model and map it to the DW tables, and all of your reports still work.

We are a Cognos-only training and consulting company so our business depends on Cognos.

The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to search the relational data tree for query items (fields). I believe this functionality has been added in v11 (Cognos Analytics). The user interface in v10 is a little dated and not as tablet-friendly as some of the other viz tools. This has been greatly improved in v11.

I have used it for three years.

There are no stability issues as long as the image is properly built and fix packs are installed.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Over a few years, we have opened only a couple of tickets with IBM and all have been handled professionally and promptly.

We have always used Cognos. We recently demo'd trial versions of Microsoft and Tableau against Cognos v11 and we still think Cognos is the better product for medium and large enterprises.

Building the image for a new version takes several hours. Of course, IBM has cloud options that eliminate the need for keeping your own images.

Like any enterprise software product, make sure you negotiate. IBM simplified the licensing in 2014, so I can't suggest any improvements there.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Make sure your CFO understands the investment required for a successful BI installation that will give you one version of the truth, whether it's Cognos or another vendor. The investment is not only in software and hardware, but in the people who use it.

We have found this software to be insightful in finding and defining true performance of products and services. The numbers give the details and there is no place to hide.

This software identifies normal product sales, margins and costing, which are basic key performance indicators. We then use this to identify service of customers and vendors. Recently “COST TO SERVE” reporting has been a “HOT” supply chain tool because this identifies the business activities and overhead costs. This reporting is NOT your (ABC) activity-based costing reporting, but a mixture of costing drivers, which usually provides surprising results.

We have also seen improvements in manufacturing processes because the tool identifies bottlenecks quickly. Most recently, the ability to have mobile reporting to our user site has been very important to drive down information.

We are excited about more features for cloud and web analytics:
- Cloud: Companies are really starting to embrace the cloud for running their business intelligence software. There is so much to choose from for supporting and servicing cloud users than 1-2 years ago.
- Web analytics: For me, this is where you see who is searching for your products and services. You can find out where in the country/world and know more about the user too. This gives you insight on your web presence and how your social media and marketing campaigns are performing. Also, who’s talking about your products and services and why? You can see what the issues are and what you are doing well.

We have used Cognos Project for 20 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

Once the users are trained on the product, everyone wants to use it, so it’s best when defining your in-house server or cloud that you incorporate future needs.

Technical support is excellent and very responsive. They have different levels of support for response time that can be purchased in addition to web help.

We had training but were able to do the install in-house.

Buy the software and licenses that you will need for the next 12-15 months.

We tried Microsoft’s offerings but found them not as full featured as Cognos.

Take time to understand your data. Decide which reporting must be from live data and what data could be taken from a data repository. Prioritize your reporting needs. Add proper time for validation and training.

• The jobs, which can be used easily, to place the right SQL-statement in the required order, makes monitoring them a lot easier
• The jobstreams, makes it possible to group the jobsteps effectively, and in the right order
• the scheduler, which makes it easy to run the jobs and jobstreams at any convenient moment
• The lookups, if working correctly (they can be unstable), provide a good way to ensure referential integrity between fact tables and dimension tables

It gave the organisation the possibility to have a closer look a the data in a more organized way. If they would have had the stability to see it through, they probably would have required insights in their (in)efficiencies that greatly would have improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the core activities (it was a callcenter).

The stability of the lookups is not very good, and really needs improvement. The tool forces you in the direction of a datamart/Kimball architecture. If that is not the architecture that you want, it requires a lot of tricks to fold it to your needs. When you use hierarchies and dimensions, you are basically more or less forced into building these first, before building the fact tables. If these dimensions need adjustment or modifications, implementing these is a very complicated delicate and a faultridden operation.

The most effective way to get a sturdy result in the Cognos Datamanager, is to leave out the fancy stuff. Only use the jobs and jobstreams (and of course the scheduler to run them). Guard referential integrity by making the correct joins in the queries which are in the jobs (and putting these of course in the right order). Then, Cognos Datamanager can be very useful, sturdy, and flexible.

I understand from fellow forum user that the Cognos Datamanager will not have technical support from IBM anymore starting from 30th September 2015. If you haven’t made a choice yet for a datawarehouse solution, choosing the Cognos Datamanager could give you serious support issues in the not so far future.

In a more general sense, why do you want a datawarehouse? If you want to resolve issues with data quality, a datawarehouse can make these visible, but there are a lot cheaper ways to achieve this. And, of course, knowing about the problem, but taking no steps to tackle these, won't solve anything. If you want a sturdy, reliable, comparable, standardized and well organized data, a datawarehouse is a good option. However, it takes time and effort. However, quite a lot of organisations use the Cognos Datamanager. Migrating to another environment is a costly and potentially risky undertaking. I expect that a lot of Cognos Datamanager applications will probably be in use for many years to come. Some useful dinosaurs, such as COBOL, still survives. I think the Cognos Datamanager can easily go that way too.