IBM Cognos Reviews

-- IBM Cognos --

- Divided into many tools like Analysis Studio, Query Studio, Report Studio
- Appropriate integration between all the tools
- Metadata is common to all tools, which offers performance and scalability
- Separately Structured Interfaces
- Very clear and service oriented Business Intelligence
- Can be done even with the basic End Users
- Loss of Performance while scaling up the hardware
- No proper tool available to store the documents
- Customers feel Cognos is Complex
- Impromptu is relatively weaker
- Cognos ROLAP Tools and MOLAP Cubes
- Inbox drill through from one report to other
- Learning is exhaustive because of many separate tools

-- SAP Business Objects (BO) --

- All in one package- Web Intelligence
- Many tools and no Proper Integration between Queries, Excessive
- Flexible and Scalable
- Integrated Dashboards
- Unclear BI future perspective because of too many tools
- IT professionals needed for every change
- Performance is consistent while Scaling UP
- Business Objects XI Info view is used to store the documents
- Customers complain BO is not fully Business Intelligence yet
- BO's adhoc reporting capability is superior
- BO is primarily ROLAP
- Time Consuming Drill Through feature
- Learning is easy since many tools are merged

IBM Cognos is a sprawling set of products aimed at providing a complete BI solution for organizations of all sizes, but specifically large organizations. Unlike some other offerings that incorporate data mining and predictive analytics capability, Cognos is targeted specifically at the traditional reporting and analysis tasks using a variety of presentation techniques. These include dashboards, graphs, charts, reports, tables and so on. For organizations that have not yet implemented an organization wide solution to this need Cognos is a prime candidate. Perhaps the strongest feature is the ability of offer an enterprise wide, integrated BI environment. And you wouldn’t expect anything less from IBM, it does major on infrastructure after all. Having said this Cognos provides a necessary, but hardly sufficient set of tools to gain commercial advantage. It may satisfy the needs of administrative and planning functions, but provides very little opportunity to employ techniques for embedding intelligence into applications. For this users will need to embrace IBM SPSS as a separate set of capabilities, or some similar set of tools.

IBM has layered the Cognos products so users can start small and grow. The most basic entry level product is the free version of Cognos Insight. This is a personal reporting and analysis tool, which in the free version will access CSV files (nice as a taster, but not really practical). The paid for versions will access a much broader set of data resources. Cognos Express is targeted at workgroups and midsize companies, and Cognos Enterprise is the full-blown BI and performance management toolset. Over thirty other Cognos products are available to support infrastructure requirements, address specific needs, and provide additional means of data visualization.

What IBM Cognos offers is a platform for looking at what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen in your business. Every organization needs this sort of capability and IBM is one of half a dozen traditional suppliers (Microstrategy, SAP, Oracle, SAS) who offer a solution. However there are new kids on the block in the shape of Qlikview, Tibco and Tableau, although they typically do not have the tailored add-ons of the more traditional suppliers.

In summary there are no compelling reasons to choose Cognos unless the suite of products offers a particularly good fit with needs, or the organization has an existing heavy commitment to IBM products and services.

Great tool, I absolutely love Cognos. Made for sitting on top of a DW, but it addition to that, in some cases we needed to build views where we would summarize things to be able to provide reports with some level of performance. Need to be careful. They provide a semantic layer which If built properly can get quite a bit of functionality out of it. But still need to be careful with volumes for specific reports.

In the February 2013 Magic Quadrant report, Gartner says that some of the top reasons why customers choose Cognos are IBM's road map and future vision. However, a high percentage of users are concerned with poor performance and difficulty of use.

What are some of the reasons you chose Cognos? What are your main concerns with IBM's product?

If you are a user or are evaluating IBM Cognos, add your comment below or write your own review. Share your opinion with our community!

For how long have you used this product?
- 12 Years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- Quick query ability

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- We use it against our enterprise data warehouse for enterprise views of data and material flow

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- Visualization

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- Scalability only due to source data issues

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- Hyperion and SQL Reporting Services. We need an integrated solution.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- Essbase, Oracle, SAP

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- Very Good

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- Setup for such a complex tool is always difficult

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- We used an outside vendor. Good, but needed some more technical understanding

What is your ROI on this product?
- 3-5 years

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- 2 Million to implement. Not sure

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- Do your homework on configuration and server architecture

Most of my experience is with Business Objects. I have done a little with Cognos Elite also. Comparatively I find Business Objects much easier to work with when it comes to customizing the presentation of the data. Neither of the two products does a drill-down as well as you can in Crystal Reports, but they both allow you to create multiple views of the data on one page. Business Object WEBI reports allow you to use multiple universes and multiple report pages in one WEBI document.

Both system will force you to use another layer between the presentation and data layers. In Cognos it is called Framework Manager. In WEBI it is called Universes. Both Universes and Framework Manager define the structure and connections the are usable to the presentation layer. Both middle layers can connect to any kind of database or even spreadsheets on an accessible drive.

Both products will force you to use their WEB portals as an interface into the presentation layer. Both allow you to schedule and deliver reports in multiple formats and in a variety of means. Links to reports, send the reports via e-mail, only send reports with data the user can see, and send alerts when reports fail are just a few of the common things that can be done.

When it comes to ease of use, Business Objects is a lot more intuitive and straight forward. Cognos seems to make you take a lot more steps to get the same results. Some of those steps are tough to figure out. The term "clunky" comes to mind when I think of working in Cognos.

Both products offer very similar concepts and tools to summarize and chart the data in a report.

Licensing costs and how you want to architect your server infrastructure are going to be the key driver to which product fits your organization better. Business Objects offers the advantage of another more static reporting tool with Crystal Reports.