IBM Cognos Reviews

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.

Report Studio is most valuable to me, mainly for the active reporting feature as our CEO loves the instant reporting.

The product takes away the need for mundane reporting via Excel spreadsheets freeing up the business areas to concentrate on growing the business.

Every product on the market can be improved, but I would like IBM to stop trying to compete with the smaller players in the market, rushing out versions that nobody wants to migrate to because the version seems unstable.

I’ve been using the Cognos product since 2006; since the old ReportNet days.

We did not encounter any specific stability issues. Like every product, you need to carry some sort of monthly maintenance to make sure that the platform runs smoothly.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. As long as you are following the guidelines set by IBM you should be ok.

If you have a contact within IBM then things are great, but some of the IBM partners (in my opinion) don’t offer the same high standard, (there are gaps in their knowledge).

We never used another solution.

The installation was quite straight forward. But the webserver setup can be a bit tricky.

Recently, IBM have changed the way they package the licensing (which so far seems to give us a better understanding of what we are paying for). The product can seem quite pricey compared to other suitors in the BI arena.

We looked at Microsoft SSRS. But on look and feel, it didn’t give us that professional outlook.

If you are new to the product and want to implement a reporting tool that will be free from issues, get an experienced consultant.

• Active Reporting: Users can access the reports offline.
• Visualization: IBM Cognos has a variety of charts. It has options to customize any kind of chart using the JSON editor. This helps clients to visualize and analyze the data in a very effective way.

This product has a wide variety of options to present data. The solution has improved our organization in the following ways:

• Builds different kinds of report like lists, crosstabs, and charts.
• Sends the report output to users.
• Offers mobile dashboard options. Client executives and directors can pull the reports to their mobile phones. They can view all kinds of data related to their organization.

I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses.

We have used this solution for over six years.

We sometimes have to restart the application.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I used the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. I switched to IBM Cognos because some of the customization options were not available in that tool.

The installation can be a little complex. It depends on the environment. If it is a Windows environment, the setup will be easy. If it is a Linux environment, it will involve scripting.

If the organization is big enough, I would recommend this product.

We evaluated other options, such as Tableau.

The product has a wide range of data presentation options. If an organization has too much reporting to do, then I would definitely suggest this product.

Almost all of the features are valuable. We have users who fit into different stacks of reporting capabilities.

Every day-to-day decision is driven by data. With this tool, we are able to provide it to relevant parties. They are happy with the data and the way it is presented.

We have users who can build ad-hoc reports on their own. They don't have to reach out to technical teams. This reduces dependencies and eliminates the turn-around time.

I would like to see more robust scheduling capabilities. Advanced audit information should be readily available, rather than pointing us to use a SDK each time.

We have been using this solution for eleven years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 4/10. IBM technical support should be improved and their turn-around time should be reduced.

We have used in-house tools before. However, we switched to Cognos because we needed something readily available and catered to different user bases.

The installation was pretty straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation that comes with it. It covers everything.

It’s an enterprise tool and different stacks of tools are beneficial for small, medium, or large companies.

We looked into Business Objects, Actuate, and Microsoft SSRS.

You need to know the details of the product to love it. This product caters to all sizes of companies and easily accommodates growing companies. It can be used across an enterprise.

The solution connects to all data sources easily. There is an express and an enterprise version.

As a consultant, I build complete business decision reports with Cognos.

For the current dashboard, it would be nice to have a better layout and more functions.

We have been using this solution for fifteen years.

Each product that I have worked with has bugs, and Cognos is no exception. There will be new releases that will fix these bugs.

Scalability is fine. I never came across any major issues

IBM has a complete knowledge base and support setup.

The installation was straightforward.

Pricing and licensing have many forms and possibilities. Take a good look at the number of users and the profiles needed. This will increase or decrease the price accordingly.

I worked with several BI products. The choice depends on the business size and preferences.

Check all BI products, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Cognos. Check the pros and cons before making the choice.

The most valuable features are activity reports and visualization. Visualization is fast and very powerful for a quick answer. It provides an interactive user experience.

It allows manually derived reporting via the DB and excel dumps to automated reports and dashboards.

In the report studio, the basic functionality requires more development.

I have been using this solution in different companies for over 10 years.

It is not very user-friendly with unstructured or direct DB connected data.

No scalability issues, but the data retrieval times of live data can be horrible.

Technical support was good until IBM took over.

I wasn’t involved with installation directly, but the consulting group set it up for us and supported it, so it was OK.

It is very costly, now that IBM has taken over.

Depending on one’s needs, I would push for Tableau more than this solution.

There are plenty of other cost effective and efficient solutions available, such as Tableau, cloud based solutions, and big data options.

It is a quick solution and has dynamic insights. The features that I liked about the system are:

• An easy creation of dashboards with insights. The dashboards that are created, are simple for data representation. Thus, the comparisons are quite user-friendly.
• A user-friendly table structure.
• Being able to create data drill up and down quite quickly. Drilling data down and up helps to understand the insights quickly. For example, in order to analyze the sales data, we get total sales-> region-wise sales-> country-wise-> district-wise-> and store-wise. Reversely, in order to understand the product performance, we would require a drill up chart, i.e., performance at the zonal level-> country level-> overall performance.

The organization was able to:

• Reduce the reporting efforts by 50%.
• Have more insightful reports.

I find areas where some improvements will help are:

• When the data becomes very voluminous, then handling and representing it becomes clumsy.
• The type of charts are only two dimensional. Currently, the charts are two dimensional to understand the trend. Also, one needs to compare the time horizon or the volume horizon separately and it will be really helpful, if that dimension could be included.
• The reporting output/UI is quite old-fashioned.
• The statistical insights are missing or they cant be created.

I have used this solution for two years.

There were no issues in regards to the scalability.

The technical support is average.

One of the reasons why we switched solutions was due to the maintenance cost and the cost of ownership.

We looked at other solutions, namely SAP and TIBCO Spotfire.

The most valuable feature is scalability. It works perfectly for companies from 100 users to companies with several thousand users.

It provides us with a wide range of professional report types through the central report designer tool, Report Studio. Standard reports, used through the whole international organization, have been made with user security to personalize the report output.

The Cognos BI suite is missing a user-friendly tool/functionality that makes it possible for regular BI users (not report developers) to make personalized reports. Generally, Cognos is not easy to use for non-experienced BI users who need to make their own reports.

We have been using this product for ten years.

There have been no stability issues. If the installation was done properly, it is a stable system.

There have been no scalability issues. The product is perfectly designed for smaller companies to multi-national companies. The server architecture must be designed accordingly, but it's easy to upscale by adding servers.

Technical support is good. The IBM Cognos support is usually dedicated and competent. Their reaction time is fast enough according to the support case priority.

I have worked in migration projects from BusinessObjects to Cognos, as the customer had bought a global IBM solution.

The initial Cognos setup requires experienced people. Besides a correct software installation on a multi-server architecture, it is important to design an adapted Framework Manager architecture. Furthermore, it requires experience to make some professional standard reports or other advanced reports, such as Active Reports.

Licensing is expensive and can be an issue to expand the number of users within a company or to get new customers. Only large companies invest in Cognos.

Cognos is not a very common BI product in Denmark, even though it's one of the best on the market with a broad palette of tools.

More creative licensing policies should be made by IBM in order to win market shares in the BI market.

Employ some experts with a lot of experience, or hire consultants with documented experience if it's difficult to recruit.

Be sure to give the right training to the developers/advanced users at the right time. In other words, don’t do it too early in the implementation phase before the product is used within the organization.