IBM Cognos Reviews

It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports.

It forced us to look into the data warehousing of our entire existing products that we were using to better evaluate data retrieval.

It takes a very long time to learn the product. It requires specialization for different functions. It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it.

Eight years using different versions.

No.

No.

Not applicable.

It was quite complex.

Learn the overview of the product first before the investing time and effort on features which you may not use.

The Report Studio feature has more customized functionalities to create reports and analysis.

Cube reporting functionality has been simplified for analyzing daily productivity.

This product needs to be improvised by:

• Clearly pointing out the issues/errors in the description to simplify the debugging process.
• Enabling more GUI based functionality so that creation of dynamic report and dashboards by using Excel/flat file data is easier.

I have used this product for eight years.

The overall stability of the product meets expectations.

Scalability is good. We did not encounter any issues.

There is need for a faster resolution and expected time frame to resolve production issues. Whilst working on site and when support is needed for emergency issues, a quicker response time is required.

We have not used any other solutions.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward.

If your organization requires features like more stability and customization of reports, then the IBM Cognos Suite is your one stop choice as a good BI tool.

Good mix of abilities for reporting for both technical and non-technical users.

Dashboarding presentations of key metrics.

• Ability to easily manage source code and environment deployment
• Pricing model is frequently changing and hard to manage
• Maintenance fees were based on a percentage of the base cost, not the discounted price we paid which was a surprise the first year

Five years - Cognos BI 8 and 10

Because the configuration options are wide, there are typically minor issues with an installation.

Not once it is configured correctly.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

6 out of 10.

Technical Support:

6 out of 10.

Previous solution was built on an old technology and updates continue to be built over the same engine rather than an updated technology. Caused issues with programming.

Complex, many options and variations available which is both good and bad.

Through a vendor. Very good expertise.

Brief evaluation of other products, selection was based on discounted pricing at year end and high rating from Gartner.

If you don't have staff with previous experience in this product, it's worth engaging a partner you help you with installation and configuration options, training and early implementation.

Graphical interface is good

Ad hoc reporting

Basically, our support to enhancement was our corporate team. Where the Oracle Quality module has more flexibility to develop internal tables to gather data. The Cognos BI team doesn’t have this dynamic approach to do the enhancements. So, Corporate decided to replace this application with Oracle OBIEE.

5 years

No

No

Yes, When it’s integrated with Oracle for Quality reports

Customer Service: 9 out of 10Technical Support: 9 out of 10

Never before.

Straightforward

In-house

No

Consider other alternatives.

Can do most things we need it do. We like the scheduler.

Visualization is not as good as some others.

The reporting feature is the most valuable feature.

For Cognos, reporting is the widely used feature for both my clients and for most of the US-based banking organizations.

The product is the main reporting tool for our clients.

I would like to see improvements in mobile reporting. When it comes to mobile/offline based reporting, Cognos is not really capable of handling medium to heavy data volume.

The above limitation has been hampering its penetration into health care and other industries which are heavily dependent upon mobile devices for day-to-day operations.

We have been using this solution for over five years.

No stability issues. The product is one of more stable reporting solutions.

No scalability issues. Scaling is fairly straightforward.

Technical support is quite satisfactory.

The initial setup is very straightforward for a technical person.

If you need enterprise grade reporting, Cognos is a very economical solution for organizations.

I have never been involved in the decision making for selecting reporting tools. I have been on the report development side using Cognos for multiple clients.

The product is very strong for an online reporting based solution.

However, if someone is looking for complex mobile based reporting, they might want to weigh other options for their organization.

The product’s most valuable feature is the open environment where we can build from scratch without too many constraints on calculations because that allows us to have extensive customization.

I implement projects using the product, and every time we implement we end up discovering a lot of unaccounted cash that was either being paid to the wrong person or extra money being paid which was unaccounted for. This helps auditing the sales personnel's incentives and also analyzing what incentives show a correlation to an improved performance.

• DBMS scalability
• Debugging
• UX for admins who are developing on the software

I have used it for 4+ years. I am certified in this tool and I primarily work on implementing this tool (among others) for various organizations’ ICM needs.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I've encountered issues where calculation runs took upwards of six hours because of data storage and build issues.

Technical support is excellent.

I did not previously use a different solution.

It's simple enough to install because IBM takes care of initial setup.

Callidus is usually this product’s competitor.

The product is as good as the team implementing it.

It is very powerful, it is a lot easier to use and the new version has a very nice look and feel.

It also has the ability to simply create a dashboard and the data module lets you easily create many data models.

We have the ability to create reports that monitor the organization in a very easy way.

I have used it for one year.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward, especially with the new version.

The price is very low for the SaaS edition.

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

It can do anything; you just have to study it a bit.