IBM Cognos Reviews

Workspace Advanced and Workspace are very intuitive and simple to use for a basic user.

It improved sales monitoring, the enterprise business unit performance (costs, revenue, human resources, etc.) and other financial aspects. It also improved the responsibility for the data input into the transactional applications.

Report authoring is sometimes difficult for authors without specific computer knowledge with regard to concepts related to database, i.e., join, union, etc.

I have been using IBM Cognos BI since version 10.0 in 2012. IBM Cognos BI 10.2.2 was released on December 2014. So, I have been using IBM Cognos 10 for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 7/10, because the first help response is fast, even if the whole resolution of the problem might be slow. In any case, tech support is good.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was simple. YouTube is a rich way to learn tips & tricks.

I'm a Cognos consultant. I work using only this solution.

• Jobs
• Schedules
• Auditing
• Report Studio

Cognos gives a consistent single source answer for many users to retrieve easily. It allows for prompted value, so many questions can be answered.

Auditing the SQL to determine if there are any particularly slow points. Also allowing jobs to send email notification when complete with links to all the reports within the email.

Seven years.

There are always some errors, but typically user errors.

It is pretty stable, but bad queries can cause problems.

No issues encountered.

6/10 as they usually get back quickly but rarely have a solution.

6/10

I used MicroStrategy before, but I changed jobs because Cognos is a bigger company and would have more job opportunities.

It is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take an expert to set up, but consultants will try to make it seem more complex than it is.

We used a vendor team. They talked a good game, but I would rate them at a 6/10.

Don't know, but it's not cheap.

It's not as good a MicroStrategy for data analysis, but better for static reporting.

Cognos Reports, Dashboards

Fast KPI tracking, Complex data analysis for decision making.

Versatility, Performance (speed)

5 years

It's hard to change built-in options.

Rarely had issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Depends on the support structure.

Depends on the support structure.

In-house team

Reporting and dashboard capabilities are the product’s most valuable features.

It provides enterprise-level reporting across all departments.

ETL features have room for improvement.

I have used it for nine years.

When we have more than 1000 users logged in to the system, we can see slowdown in terms of performance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. We have always used IBM Cognos product suites.

Initial setup was pretty much straightforward.

We certainly looked at other BI products such as SAP BusinessObjects, OBIEE, Oracle Discoverer, WebFOCUS, Argos, and MicroStrategy but Cognos was our unanimous choice.