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.

I am an architect who builds solutions. I have 20 years of experience with translating business needs for BI and data warehouse solutions.

We get to create customized solutions for many users. In our organization, we reach 40% of the employees with information from the data warehouse.

• The ability to build solutions that can be changed so that the solution is up to date. The possibility of integrating third parties through HTML and Java code in a supported way. 
• It's possible to add to the role management and security that can be maintained.

• Continue to develop the AI assistant so we can add business logic to the metadata. 
• Ability to insert own graphs in D3 through supported API. 
• Prompting should be better.

We use it as our main reporting tool for implementing BI solutions. We have been using the whole Cognos suite for a while now.

The upgraded visualizations and more user-friendly interface have increased the acceptance rate of this tool.

• Ability to connect to a number of databases
• Framework manager modelling
• Data modules
• Building ad hoc reports from CSV files.

The latest visualization doesn't give much flexibility to the users in terms of what can be changed. For example, there are fixed palettes. The dashboard interface needs tremendous improvement as it's not very fast as compared to Tableau and the likes.

My primary use case for this solution is for analytics and monitoring event metrics.

It's very easy to use. You can use cubes, you can create reports and you can create dashboards in it. It's all in one. Also, the integration on Cognos Analytics with Cognos IT Analytics also is better. 

We have found this solution evolve over the years, it is now very user-friendly.

The charts and graphics are very weak. You can find some dashboards, but it is very rigid. It is not as fancy as what you find in another solution, like Microsoft BI.

We considered Microsoft BI.

For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent.

We use it for standard reporting in the platform, and we are satisfied with the product.

1. It helps us deliver information to people in different functions. 
2. It is possible to have people make their own reports, so they have service functionality.

A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports. 

We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics.

The latest version is very stable. We have not had any problems.

I have found no problems with scalability. With a good server, everything works.

IBM Cognos can improve in this area. Both IBM and our company do research to find solutions, and we are sometimes faster than they are in providing the solution that works, usually by studying documents. 

We can use the normal routines sufficiently to solve problems. However, if we try to add components which are not streamlined or well-known, we have to work it out without the technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I was not involved in this process. The product was chosen 18 years ago.

We always return to the same vendors, such as IBM, SAP, and Tableau. If there is an existing environment where a lot of reports are outdated, changes need to be made. If we have a running system that is up with no technical problems and the price is not changing drastically, then no change is necessary.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10, because of the support. Other than support, everything works.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: When we search for a vendor, we always make comparisons between them. In France, we were surprised by the product, what it delivers, and what is included in the package. There are a lot of different tools on the market that deliver on some points, but not all.

Cognos Analytics gives us a lot of possibilities, including dashboarding, which you would have to purchase additionally from other providers. Every three or four years, we do some benchmarking to analyze the product.

It has improved things in a lot of areas, such as in better decision making for the company. People are relying more on the reports coming out of Cognos, or a BI tool, rather than their own spec sheets. It gives them time to invest in other activities.

Developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source.

What we have noticed is that it's lacking a few things which we want, especially on the visualization side of things. We want Cognos to improve, IBM to improve. But functionally, it has been working fine.

One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map.

It's a quite stable environment. I have used technical support with the 10.1 version of Cognos, but not with the latest version. Anything after 10.1, it has become a quite stable environment.

Scalability is okay.

We were not using anything previously. We have been with Cognos for a long period of time.

But with the inquiries and the market requirements and the new tools coming into the picture, and the customers who see all these beautiful presentations, they want those tools to be implemented in the company. That's how we started looking into other opportunities.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are that the product is scalable, provides ease of use requiring less dependency on IT, and is user-friendly, providing end-users the power to actually create their own dashboards, reports, or any kind of analysis of the fly.

I was hands-on in setting up the environment for our company. It was pretty straightforward. It's a bit fiddly on a few things, if you want some extra components installed, but overall, the basic installation is pretty straightforward.

If you are looking into BI tools, you need to go through how scalable and dynamic the tool will be, and how you're going to actually use it, how the users are going to use the tool in the end. There are various tools on the market. One can do one thing and another can do the other thing. There is not much of a comparison. If you look at Cognos, or if you look at other tools, Cognos is really good when you're looking for credibility of data. But if you're looking at other aspects of usability, then it's not that great. Investigate thoroughly is my advice.

Cognos is an eight out of 10 because it's still lagging behind in some of the capabilities which other BI tools in the market are providing. Images are one of those things. Otherwise, it's really good, it does the job. Still, people have the impression that Cognos still has that dependency on IT.

It's performed very, very well. Its primary use is reporting from all our systems.

It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information.

Reliability and strength of product. It's proven to be very robust. It's been great.

I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like. 

Very good. It's very reliable. Very stable. Gives us very little trouble.

Very good. We've been able to add more systems to it and it has no performance problems. We've recently got some guys to rejig it and we've got a lot more performance out of it. We're very pleased. It's clearly an enterprise product.

I haven't used it but the team has. I think they found it very helpful, and got back to them in a reasonable period of time.

We were previously using three or four different solutions. We've had Cognos for 10, 12 years, so it's going back quite a bit of history. But yes, we had different solutions. We're a government organization, so we went out to tender and got Cognos and we're very pleased with the results.

I would certainly give it a nine out of 10, and I could be persuaded to give them a 10. It's very good. Done lots of things we needed it to do, some very, very complex reports. It's been able to develop them. It's delivered them. Very impressed.

Make sure you understand what you want to do with the tool, and make sure you have a good budget to make sure it's successfully implemented.

We use it for financial purposes, and simple reporting.

It's compatible with the whatever applications we have. That's why we got it.

The scheduling and reports.

It should be more user-friendly. 

Stability is good.

Scalability is okay.

Not very good because we didn't get a deep, back-end partner fit.

The most important criteria when choosing a vendor would be that the product is the very user-friendly and that we can upload the files into the system for reporting purposes.

I give this solution a rating of five out of 10 because it's not very user friendly.