IBM Cognos Reviews

We analyze data from their marketing campaigns, and social networks in order to determine which campaigns are more effective, and which channels are producing the best results.

It's quite easy to use.  

The tool has a group of algorithms that allows you to find links rapidly.

It is also very easy to create link charts and analytics quickly.

This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats. We don't have any kind of issues with this product.

The online documentation is good, but it could be better. If the documentation could provide more examples, it would be nice.

It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

We are using the Cognos Analytics version.

It's a stable solution. It's very strong. 

With Software Assessment Services, you can forget about the infrastructure. The servers and everything that is related to the typical deployment of the tool is easy because it's on the IBM Cloud.

Your focus your attention on using it instead of the technical side of things.

It is too soon for me to say anything about the scalability, but my impression is that it doesn't matter the amount of data you need to analyze the tool. The background has the infrastructure and the features that allow you to grow according to what you need.

Currently, we have a couple of users but will have five or six more next month. 

The technical support is fast. 

You have access to a knowledge base where you can look for the issue. If you cannot find it, you can contact IBM support and you will get an answer very quickly.

We were working with Power BI on a local deployment, but unfortunately, it suddenly presented some issues. We tried to re-install it but were not successful. To this day, we still don't know why this happened. 

We quickly changed to IBM Cognos and is quite good.

We were also working with Tableau. It's also a local installation. It's very good, very powerful, and has a lot of features you can use to analyze the data. Cognos is easier to use.

The initial setup was extremely easy.

You log in from your account or create an account and instantly you have access to a 30-day trial or you can test the tool, and create exercises to determine if it is good for you. Once complete you can decide if you want to pay monthly or you can dismiss the tool.

In our case, the only thing that we needed to do was to upload the data, which took a couple of hours.

We don't require any staff to maintain this solution.

I don't have this information, it is handled by our finance department. 

It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive.

It's a good idea to take a course online to learn how it works before you start.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for reporting.

The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. 

We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis.

It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.

We implemented it on the web. Before that, there was a separate request that needed to be raised for a report to be issued. We needed to fetch items and it took time. Now, according to their requirement, users can schedule their own reports. They get a URL they can access. They have a GUI on the Netcool page and they can access the data using this Cognos report. 

The solution is pretty easy to install. The documentation on offer is very good and it's very instructive.

The user interface is very nice. IBM Netcool interface is the same, and we can implement the same Netcool web GUI on a web page. Within the Netcool servers, we can integrate this tool to give users access to the environment.

The integration and configuration capabilities are very good.

The solution is very simple while also being quite robust and scalable. 

As we get new requirements, we need to see if they fit into Cognos. As of right now, it fits our needs, however, that can change.

We've had issues in the past that the solution is still working to resolve.

The solution seems to slow down the servers. We're working with IBM to see if this can be resolved. 

The scalability is quite good. this type of solution is built for enterprises, and our enterprise environment is quite large. the solution handles it well. It can scale.

Technical support is a 10 out of 10. IBM is always available when we raise a PMR with them. Even on Level 2 or Level 3 issues, they will come into the picture and they are used to researching if any issue comes their way. They'll work to replicate the issue in their lab environment and they'll give a resolution. That is very good and helpful for us, for our team. We are extremely satisfied with their level of support. 

We did use other reporting in the past, however, it was not as good or as easily scheduled as this product.

The solution is very easy to implement. It's not overly complex or difficult. The documentation is good from IBM. IBM tried to create not too much complexity in terms of integration and configuration. We can usually implement using the IBM docs. It's not a problem.

I can't speak to the direct pricing, although it is my understanding that it is high. That said, the solution holds great value.

We are customers and partners.

Currently, we are also using AIOps and IBM Watson also, which is an artificial intelligence tool that is also very easy.

We trust IBM and its platforms. They've optimized for monitoring very well. Their support is also excellent.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. So far, it's been a great solution for us. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

My primary use case for IBM Cognos is reporting.

I work with a few organizations. IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team. For example, we know which offers work and which offers don't. We've got a very good record of that. We have the very good ability to check the meetings of the actual salespeople. When they are made, who is in them, how effective the meetings were compared to what we estimated. It's very, very good on that level.

Additionally, the budget control is very good. We get triggers once a budget is crossed. It creates and sends an email to the person who needs to know, "Hey, you're in trouble. Basically, you've crossed the line." Which a lot of times you don't realize. You have a team of 20 people and the manager gets an email if somebody has done something or there's a problem, and it gives them a very strong awareness.

IBM Cognos' feature that I have found most valuable is its ability to create very complex reports which are not available in other tools.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful.

I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring.

I have been implementing IBM Cognos for over 20 years.

I think they're very stable.

IBM Cognos is the most scalable option, I think. It can handle thousands of users at the same time. If anything, the only thing you need is hardware that can support it.

This product is usually focused on medium to large organizations.

I'm really satisfied with the technical support. We encountered a couple of very unique bugs and IBM was very helpful. People from IBM found a quick workaround and then they solved the problem. So I'm very happy with it.

The initial setup usually takes a few hours.

You need a consultant or an integrator for setup. You need somebody to do it. You can't just do it by yourself.

In terms of pricing, for what you get, it's a relatively good price. It's good value for what you pay for. But you always want things for cheaper, but the price for what you get is relatively good, because everything is included. Everything, all the extra features that with other products you have to pay for, here they are just included. It's in it. You don't have to pay for sending out emails, you don't need to have an extra mail server. It's in the product.

On a scale of one to ten I would give IBM Cognos a nine.

I would suggest to potential customers that if they don't have experience, there is a lot of information on the web. There are wonderful video clips in YouTube. There are wonderful blogs. Before you decide on a solution, check. There might be something that's even better than what you thought initially. The abilities are so wide and amazing that a lot of times people take a solution which is not the best, because they do what they know and they don't think, "Hey, I can do something much better."

Make sure you know all the options before you choose one. And again, reconsider. If you checked it three or four versions ago, then check again. There are new features all the time that are changing and improving, and you can get amazing results.

We are a solution provider. We come up with the business requirements for our clients, and then we provide a complete solution for catering to their specific needs.

We come up with a customized BPM or a BA or another analytical solution and we offer them as a package. 

IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions. You have Report Studio and Analytics Studio, where they have different tools for designing reports. These include report templates and comping up with canned reports.

The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved. The way they have designed the framework, the framework manager is a critical part. If you have a properly-designed framework manager then whatever stories you generate through the Report Studio or Query Studio will give you better results. However, if the modeling is incorrect then it will kill your free memory and detract from the performance.

You have to have complete control of the data model, including the hierarchy and the relationships. There are still a lot of loose ends. The way that a many-to-many relationship can be defined within the framework should be brought into the Report Studio and Query Studio. This would be an improvement. 

There can be a recursive effect, where you are pulling resources away from the users. This will eat away the resources and cause them a lot of lag time in their reporting.

We have been working with IBM Cognos for almost 25 years, since 1996 or 1997. 

The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises. These higher licensing costs are why we recommend Pentaho or Talend for the SME segment. For them, they have to minimize the total cost of ownership. This segment is also interested in open-source enterprise solutions, which will reduce their costs to a large extent.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to ensure that they are clear with the business requirements. You have to define the model in the first place, so you want to design the model with all of the business hierarchies and attributes so that there will be no further re-working it, or any re-production of work in the future. This means that you have to plan your model, get a model, and then framework manage your model well in advance. Then your reporting and analytics will be very good.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are the AI-based questions.

The storyboarding and storytelling features of Cognos Enterprise are both very good.

The solution offers excellent dashboard creation capabilities. I use this extensively.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Overall, there aren't any features that are lacking in the product.

The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution.

I'd like to see more predictive analytics enhancements in future releases.

I've been using this solution for our years now.

The solution is very stable. We don't worry about bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash on us at all. It doesn't freeze. It's reliable.

You can scale the solution if you need to. That's not a problem.

At our organization, we have between 150 and 200 people using it at any given time.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. We found them to be helpful. We've been satisfied with the service provided.

We did use Cognos Express originally. It's built for smaller deployments, and we were on the margins in terms of parameters. In the end, our organization found that it was too small for our needs and we moved up to their Enterprise option.

We also use Phillips and Oracle Business Intelligence as well as Power BI.

The initial setup isn't very complex. It's mostly straightforward. However, due to the setup of our organization and its architecture, we did face a few specific complexities during implementation.

We have seven people who handle the administration as needed.

We had someone who helped us set everything up and provide the required technical training.

We'd like the pricing to be reduced, of course. We'd like to reduce the cost period.

I'm a user, not a vendor or a reseller.

We use the enterprise version of the product.

In terms of BI tools, I'd advise others that this is one of the best. It was easy to use once we had the initial training that is required. The features such as storytelling, AI based sessions, are great. I would recommend it to other companies for sure.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight.

Our primary use for the solution is just pure BI (Business Intelligence) delivery.  

After centralizing the data, the people using the product have the ability to view all the numbers through one single platform. It is also providing them the information they need in order to make their business decisions.  

Cognos has a drag-and-drop interface for selecting packages to use in creating their own ad hoc reports and this makes it very easy to use. A second thing that is valuable is the way that it allows you to customize the security.  

So far we do not have any issues with the functionality. The cost per year could be improved. They are the leader in the industry and they charge a lot. If you are the end-user and you want to work with the leader you cannot complain about the cost and you have to pay for it.  

If they were going to make improvements, I would say that they could do more related to big data. I think they were lacking in the initial phases of development in this area. I am not sure if they may have addressed these concerns already because I have not seen their new capabilities in more recent releases. But initially, it was lacking strength in the area of big data.  

I have been using this product since I joined this company is 2013. So I have been using it for about seven years.  

We have been running the Cognos environment from 2013 onward. In that time, I have never seen a single instance of it going down. The small bugs come and go just like that. There have been a few small bugs, but never anything that was around for long. Even a product like Microsoft which has tremendous development resources is releasing monthly patches. Every product will have small issues.  

We currently have mostly data management people using the product and that is a total of about 200 people using the reports.  

In my lifetime, I have never had to call technical support for Cognos. That is from my experience. I never had any issue that was too difficult to deal with myself and I never needed to go to them directly. I have no first-hand experience with support. It probably suggests something about the quality of the product if in seven years you never have to consult the company for technical support.  

We have not switched. We chose it because it was the industry leader in this category. It was our initial selection and we never went back.  

The setup is straightforward. If the organization has a very complex architecture, I would say it might take many months to implement it properly. But setting up the environment is normally just a couple of hours or maybe a day or two of work. Generally, I would say it is easy to do the initial setup. It was easy for us.  

I think as per my understanding, everyone has their own criterion and measure for the way a product fits into their scenario. If they have the resources and can budget for the investment in this product and if they have the kind of infrastructure that warrants the investment, definitely to go for this product. If the business or user has budget constraints, I would say there are a lot more other options. It comes down to the capabilities of the different solutions and how they satisfy user needs.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product a seven-out-of-ten. I keep three points back because I feel that in being a leader, they are missing some of the functionality that they should have already which is somewhat basic. Everything it should be supporting is not there. Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say.  

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.

New project to leverage enterprise-wide reporting and analytics. Serving as a standard report and application needs as well as any self-service BI needs.

Numerous large data sets (more than 150 MIO records) are in the data warehouse, self-service BI required (self-serve analysis), Netezza as back-end and Cognos Analytics 11 as front-end.

• Extremely fast solution using IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes. Aggregate aware querying providing a fast-on-fast solution (in combo with Netezza). In addition, the interactive viewer of Cognos Analytics and dashboards provide for a unprecedented experience of key users with their data, enabling them to change visualizations on the fly, applying different sorts, filters, etc. This enables them to do further analysis than what is possible with a predefined application.
• Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive.
• Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.
• Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc.

• Dynamic Cubes provide fast analytics through aggregate awareness querying on aggregate, fact tables.
• Dashboards providing an easy interface to build interactive dashboards. 
• Watson Analytics suggests visualizations, which helps users to build visualizations for data exploration.
• Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers.
• Interactive viewer enabling live interaction with standard reports, filtering, sorting, changing visualizations, etc.

• Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool.
• Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures (also being aggregate aware).

Response times should fall in seconds, not minutes. Visualizations should be strong. System should be capable of guiding users in their data exploration.

Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) 10.x is a web-based, integrated BI software suite owned by IBM. It provides a toolset for reporting, analysis, scorecarding and the monitoring of events and metrics. The software consists of several components which are designed to meet the different information requirements in a company.

I have many clients using Cognos for their ad-hoc query and standardized reporting needs. It fits the category of an “enterprise” business intelligence platform very well. It also integrates seamlessly with IBM’s Cognos TM1 financial performance management solution for corporate planning, budgeting, and forecasting needs.

One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability. Its flagship Report Studio component allows BI developers to transform data in many ways, create pixel perfect objects and standard reporting applications.

One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics. This is something IBM has recognized and addressed in order to more effectively compete against other leading visualization products like Qlik Sense and Tableau. They have made major improvements in their latest release of the Cognos v11 platform also known as “Cognos Analytics”. This version of the product has been redesigned with a more intuitive interface and offers complete guided and business self-service capabilities designed to quickly identify and gain insights from your data.

I have not experienced many issues in terms of stability. The product is fairly stable, especially if you are keeping up with the latest releases of upgrades and fix packs.

With the proper end-user training and internal support, the product seems to scale well. As stated before, it fits the category/need of an “enterprise” business intelligence platform very well.

If you pay for IBM software technical support and work with a “supported” version of the product, then support is usually very helpful. Depending on how business critical the case is, they are fast in their response times.

I work with customers who have multiple BI solutions in-house. I position Cognos where I see fit, utilizing the application for its strongest assets and where I see the most value-add.

Depending on customer needs, complexity and size of the BI environment, the initial setup can be tailored to either being very straightforward or robust/complex.

If you are going to invest in a reputable quality BI solution, be prepared to not be frugal in terms of pricing/licensing. IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market.

Many organizations are using a blend of different BI solutions and there are many products/solutions on the market today. I encourage my customers to evaluate different products. Based on their business/project needs, they can then choose the best solution that fits their criteria and culture.

I would give the same advice as I would with implementing any BI tool/solution. Focus on building a stable and scalable foundation that’s built to last and also intuitive to the end-user. Place an emphasis on data governance/quality, change management and continuous product training for developers and consumers. This is extremely important when implementing any new BI/Analytics technology.

I primary use IBM Cognos BI as the preferred tool for my consultancy activity. I use it since 1999, and I've worked with IBM Cognos suite since its version 5.5 until the current version 11.

Flexibility: It offers a variety of technical solutions to better satisfy each customer’s needs and scenarios.

IBM Cognos BI (version 10) is a suite of different modules for reporting and analysis:

• Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting.
• Workspace Advanced: A mid-powerful tool, to create reports of medium complexity.
• Query Studio: An easy tool to quickly create ad-hoc queries (with a simple list, or crosstab, or chart).
• Analysis Studio: A simple tool to create analysis (like pivot-tables in Excel).
• Workspace: A very basic tool to build and show dashboards using other reports components.
• Metric Studio: A tool to create scorecards showing trends for corporate KPI and metrics.
• Event Studio: A tool that notifies the user of events happening in corporate data.

Each of them is perfect for a specific need.

For the metadata modeling activity, as well, Cognos offers several modeling tools:

• Framework Manager: The most flexible and used tool for metadata modeling.
• Transformer: The tool to create multi-dimensional cubes (MOLAP cubes).
• Cube Designer: The tool to create dynamic cubes (ROLAP cubes).
• Metric Designer: The tool to create data packages to be used by Metric Studio to create scorecards.

Depending on how much data has to be analyzed (or other factors), the modeler will decide which modeling tool to use.

I’m a freelancer; I am a consultant. I’ve helped hundreds of customers to better understand their business and to make better decisions.

I think IBM Cognos BI solution needs improvements in:

1) chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't.

2) data source connections: many other competitors support connections to cloud and innovative data sources (Google Analytics, Facebook, Microsoft Azure, MongoDb, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint and so on), that IBM Cognos BI cannot connect to.

3) maps: IBM Cognos BI have only 35 predefined maps. If you need a map of a particular area, you need to buy it (in MapInfo or Esri formats) and convert it in Cognos format, and this is pretty a long way. Furthermore, it's very inconvenient to use Google Maps maps, since this kind of integration is not native.

I sometimes encounter stability issues, but they’re rarely really issues.

I have never encountered any scalability issues. The product easily scales very well.

I would rate technical support between 2 and 3 our of 10. Several times in the past, I have needed the help of IBM official technical support, and there was more lost time than any actual contribution received. The IBM technical support people often know IBM products less than I do. So, nowadays, I no longer make use of technical support; it’s almost always useless. This means I do not waste a lot of time for no reason.

I’ve always used this solution.

When I initially studied the IBM Cognos software, it was not so easy to fully understand, but now all in all it’s not so complex.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing IBM Cognos.

In the last weeks I'm having a look to Tableau Software.

Be sure you have an expert Cognos consultant before starting.

Cognos is a MOLAP BI tool which covers cubes, dimensional and relational reports, along with different types of complex functions across all databases available in the market. It is a complete analytical solution including all BI combinations. Within it, Report Studio is one single powerful tool which works across all concepts like slicing and dicing, drill through, drill up and down, advanced filtering/prompts, master-detail, report bursting, and conditional formatting/rendering. Also, the advanced visualizations from versions 10.2.2 and 11 are valuable. The Report Studio feature supports all types of complex and analytical reporting, making it a useful tool.

Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users.

Risk analytical reporting has become easy as there is more compatibility. Also, in the future, a Cognos analytic version will be launched that works well with advanced features like cloud, big data and machine learning (Watson analytics).

The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions.

In Cognos version 10.2.1 RAVE visualizations are still coping to become an easy user interface for developing advanced charts compared to Tableau/QlikView (as it is a BI tool) . As of now, only active reports are available. In Cognos version 10.2.2. and 11, the analytics feature seems to be upgraded and on par with other competitive tools in the market.

I have used this product for three years.

deployment and migrations can be easily handled using clipboard or import/export method

In regards to stability, the performance aspect needs to have more enhancements.no

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

4/5

I would give their technical support a 6/10 rating (actually, it varies from 6-8 level).

IBM or any other vendor resolves documented errors but ultimately the application development / admin team should be able to identify the root cause of the issue and resolve it. IBM can only suggest best practices, so in general a 6-8 rating is quite good for any vendor. IBM has a good PMR system and a decent support reference available online.

IBM also has deals on client partnerships based on the organization licenses where they will be on field at times to help their customers (this is service may require additional payments).

We have consistently made use of the same solution with older versions.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

in-house

60-70%

The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market .

I did not evaluate any other options prior to choosing this product.

It is a BI tool that covers concepts namely BI, visualization, mobile, cube and all modern concepts.

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.

This is an all-in-one solution that provides reporting for a lot of different reports and visualizations. It provides one tool that works for 90% of situations.

Cognos has a lot of tools such as:

• The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers.
• The Query Studio that is aimed at business users.
• The Event Studio that is used to check conditions before triggering an action.
• The PowerPlay transformer to build cubes.
• The Analysis Studio to report against cubes and others such as planning.

So it covers a lot of the areas that are required for reporting. As far as visualization is concerned, Cognos is trying to keep up with the others. Cognos version 11 has a lot of new charts but still not as good as the other tools that are dedicated for visualization like Tableau, Spotfire etc.

This product has helped to provide basic reporting for reducing manual work as well as some dashboard visualizations for executives to see what's going on in one glance.

Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved. Cognos doesn't have all the charts that are available in the other tools such as Tableau, Spotfire etc. Cognos is trying to keep up with the others and Cognos version 11 has a lot of new charts but still it has a lot of room for improvement.

Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode). I think these are the two main reasons why a lot of companies are using Tableau/OBI/ Spotfire even when they have Cognos.

I have used this solution for eleven years.

Cognos is very stable, after tweaking server settings.

Cognos has different licensing models. PVU license limits CPU and there is need to add that for more users.

It's a mix. Some support agents are very good while some don't have a clue of what's going on.

We did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The basic installation is very easy and you can start reporting.

Make sure to assess the number of concurrent users and the type of users, i.e., studio vs viewers. Also, there is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties.

This product is easy to install and you can start reporting off. However, it needs a lot of tweaking according to the different setups and also has a lot of components that need different skill sets.

It's all consolidated in one solution, so it doesn't have a few things that the other small tools do better.

Cognos is easy to learn and I see a lot of the new consultants in this field, more than in any other BI tool. However, becoming an expert takes a lot of time.

FM – though it lacks some of the previous version's features: dimensional and sorting.

We're thinking about a different product.

There are a number of things, but I would start with just a few...

Framework Manager:

1. Query subjects sorting in a model are absent.
2. DMR model in FM is currently decommissioned, but basically needed.
3. Cubes – requires my time to explain, but cannot work properly with a big dimensions.

I've used this solution for three years.

Yes.

Yes.

Bad.

Not applicable.

Some issues, though not many.

Not matching the product quality.

Started working with what was used by the organization.

If you choose a Cognos product, be aware to wait until at least the second or third fixpack appears.

There are several valuable features of Cognos. In this review, I will be concentrate more on the Automating Cube Building and Deployment without any manual intervention.. even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'.

IBM Cognos Transformer cubes are one of the widely used OLAP data sources. Normally, a PowerCube contains calculated and aggregated data that is organized as dimensions and measures, which can be viewed and analyzed in Analysis Studio and Report Studio (versions 10). Users find it easy to use and quick to access aggregated summary data which help in better analysis. IBM Cognos PowerCube data is static, and building a PowerCube naturally becomes a repetitive process. At my work place, cube data is refreshed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Since the data volume and the number of dimensions and measures in the cube are big, the build process takes 3-4 hours to complete. In order to ensure the most benefit from the cube, having a scheduled and automated cube build is essential.

Deployment and Activation a new feature which was introduced in version 8.4 that allows the cube file to be automatically copied over to a specified local or network location, activated and/or archived depending on the requirements.

Basically one needs to set the Deploy properties on the .mdl file using Transformer.

– Deployment Strategy: select the “Copy to available locations, then activate” option. This will copy the cube .mdc file to target server location.

– After building the cube: select “Automatically copy and active”.

– Deployment location: add a path for production and/or a place that .mdc file should be deployed too. You can select multiple locations. For instance, the same cube may be deployed to both the Development and Production servers.

– Check “Enable automatic PowerCubes deletion”

Once the changes are made, we need to use the Cognos Transformer command line is capable of performing certain modeling and cube-building tasks on the Windows, UNIX or Linux platforms.

The general syntax for using windows command line is as follows:

cogtr -n -lcognostr10=

Notice that after the cube build completes, Transformer automatically deploys and activates the newly generated cube. It doesn’t require any changes to the data source connection. The live cube swap is effective immediately.

Just a few more steps (on Windows environment), you can now schedule the cube build via a job scheduler application, such as Windows Scheduled Tasks. Here once the ETL process is complete, a Flag file would be sent to Transformer box to trigger the cube builds. You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule.

- Need improvement towards Visualization.

I've used Cognos in some form or the other past 10+ years

Yes, since we were implementing VB Script batch file process on the Transformer server. We had to do some testing to ensure success. Later worked like a charm.

Cognos is extremely stable... Unless someone develops and tries to run a huge data set.. Its all about educating users.

No

Customer Service is good and quick answering.

Yes, Technical Support is very good to some extent.. They would try the initial knowledgebase solutions ( which we would have already tried) .. but they do work along with us to solve issues... sometimes it is quick, some time it takes time reproducing the issue and solving..

Always been using different versions of Cognos - right from the Impromptu.

It was a mix of both.

In-house. I have implemented most of the solution specific to user requirements.. One of them is the automate cube build and deployment.

Cognos Analytics, or CA for short, is an enterprise level reporting platform. At the most basic level you can use it to build reports. But taking a broader look allows you to see that it covers a vast amount of ground through many different modules.

The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools.

Framework Manager allows you to build relationships between physical database tables, and even a ROLAP solution. Great for detailed or minor aggregation.

Transformer is a basic cube modeling software. Best for building dimensional models over smaller datasets (a few dozen GB), it works extremely well.
Dynamic Cubes is a more advanced ROLAP solution that has intelligent aggregate, query, data, and result set caching. In my experience this works best with larger data, in the TB or PB ranges.

Data Modules. This is an advanced user level modelling. It allows end users to build and cache datasets which they can then use in ad-hoc dashboards and reports.

On the reporting side it, again, has a few tools.

Report Studio is the professional reporting environment. This allows BI Developers to create advanced reports, dashboards, analytical applications. While it does take some training, the effort is well worth it.

Dashboards work against the data modules. T allows advanced users to work with the data modules they've built previously to build dashboards. Users can quickly drag in fields directly onto the canvas to make graphs, prompts, data grids. Interactivity is automatically defined (but can be defined manually) to allow users to filter one group of objects by clicking on another.

Story is a tool used to create presentations. You can use elements from other reports to make a slide show or "guided journey".

There are a few other tools, like Event Studio which can be set to automatically perform actions based on query outputs. There is a graph building tool that allows you to build graphs that developers can use in their reports.

As a consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with a very wide range of clients with very specific needs. So far, Cognos has not failed to meet their needs, and surpass their expectations. The beautiful thing about Cognos is its flexibility.

One client, a government research organization, uses the tool to track specific incidents. When certain criteria occur, specific reports should be emailed. An SMS should be delivered. The researchers needed to be able to view the incidents from as many different perspectives as possible, and quickly go from one perspective to another without losing the context. Dynamic filtering and linking prevailed here.

Another client wanted to expose Cognos to the general public, embedding report outputs in their own portal system. This required a heavy security presence, with redundant levels of data and object security. Even if a report developer did leave a hole in the report, malicious end-users would never be able to get any data they weren't permitted to see. Cognos withstood the probing of professional pen-testers with admirable results.

As with all products, I have run into bugs; some severe enough to derail the project until IBM provided a patch. IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner. Fortunately, show-stopping bugs are few and far between.

I have worked with IBM Cognos for many years, across several different product versions. The most recent being IBM Cognos Analytics 11.6.

Cognos presents interesting scaling opportunities. Additional servers can be loaded and unloaded as needed, and there are many ways of routing report runs. For larger organizations, it's possible to optimize report runs by having one branch of an organization always run reports from a single server.

Support is not cheap, and consultants (hello!) generally charge a few appendages. This is, of course, a matter of getting what you pay for.

The best piece of advice I can give to companies considering Cognos is to factor in the cost of training or consultants. Cognos, despite what some sales people may say, is not an easy tool to start with. It requires a hefty amount of investment to implement. But with proper training, and working with the tool's strengths, the return is well worth the price.

The jobstreams and the ways SQL-scripts can be effectively organized behind icons.

• It gave the organization a better insight in the quality of the data, which in many ways was poor.
• It gave the call center the possibility to monitor its effectiveness and efficiency a lot better.

• The Cognos Data Manager is very datamart/Kimball oriented, and it should be made more flexible, so that it can be used for architectures like Inmon’s or a data vault.
• Some of its components are not very stable (for instance the lookups).
• The prescribed working order (dimensions and hierarchies, then fact-tables) makes implementing design adaptations a complex and risky operation: loosen one thread, and a lot more go with it, and this should me made more flexible.

I've used it roughly for more than a year.

The stability of the Cognos Data Manager is quite good. It doesn’t crash very often, but of course making daily backups of your work is a wise thing to do, as with any tool.

No issues encountered.

We only had a company provide digital training. Their communication was poor, and they worked with a call center which was totally uneffective.

I had to make do with what could be found on websites and the internet. The information IBM gives here is solid, but very technical and hard to read. Other websites have to be handled with care as many contributions are more enthusiastic then useful.

I started using Cognos Data Manager because the company I worked for already used it.

To start with SSIS:

• SSIS is a lot more flexible than the Cognos Data Manager. In the latter, the user is pushed into the direction of a Kimball datamart architecture (data marts, which in a later stage are to be integrated into a integrated solution). SSIS leaves a lot more room to the user to make his or her own decisions (and suffer the consequences of these)
• The user interface is a lot more user friendly in SSIS, while Cognos Data Manager is somewhat outdated (but can in capable hands still be used very effectively)

In comparison with large scripts in Oracle and SQL Server:

• The Cognos Data Manager provides a comparison of large scripts for a real and substantial improvement. The icons and jobstreams provide a lot of structure, and are a lot easier to read and interpret than large scripts which can be hundreds of pages long
• Functions like lookups are very nice, but not always enterily stable (which is a serious drawback in their use)
• Combining Oracle and SQL Server databases with each other is a definite strong point of the Cognos Data Manager (although no longer a unique selling point)
• The SQL-scripts are pasted behind the icons. It makes tracing errors and the logic of processes a lot easier

It had already been installed, and I got a lot of support from other people in the company. I have no experience with a vendor team.

The company I worked for got a better understanding of its poor data quality, and many inefficiences in its operations. But in their mindset, speed is everything, and precision is often regarded as something of a luxury. They got more insights, made a lot of noise about it, but made no structural efforts for improvement.

• Consider carefully if you want a Kimball architecture with datamarts for your datawarehouse. If so, the Cognos Data Manager is a good option. If not, I think you should reconsider
• Consider what exactly you want to achieve with your datawarehouse. For having a historical database, it can be quite effective. For daily control, in most cases a datawarehouse architecture is unsuitable and unwieldy. Direct reports on source systems are than a better option
• If your organisation has issues with data qualities, a datawarehouse won’t solve these. It can only make these visible (and there are probably a lot of cheaper ways to do that)

• The solution is very flexible, but IT oriented.
• It is an enterprise level solution for BI that holds value in a traditional BI sense.
• It is a full platform that is designed for the full cycle (data warehousing to pixel perfect reporting).
• It provides a managed IT environment.
• It does not excel in any one specific area, such as in visualization. However, there appears to be a lot of development with complementary products such as Watson Analytics and TM1.

We have been able to provide managed data sources and packages to end users. They can use this content to do their own reporting without IT assistance.

It is similar to a competency center, in which IT will help resolve or work on complex requirements or projects.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Tools: Dashboards, visualizations, and the simplification of the available tools
• Licensing: It is very difficult to know which studio needs to be passed to which users or projects. This is because licensing and tools are confusing and they overlap with one another. Even for OLAP, there are issues with transformers, TM1, dynamic cubes, and compatibility with other vendors’ cubes.
• Simplicity: There are CQM and DQM modes, so it can become very technical.
• Consistency: They made a decision to deprecate Query Studio and migrate to Workspace Advanced. However, that did not happen. They wanted to push the new version which will deprecate Workspace Advanced as well.

Basically, Cognos has been a traditional BI platform. Lately, there has been a trending push for more of a modern BI approach that is heavier on the self service side. This approach does not care for the whole cycle of waiting on a request to go through the IT development chain in order to make it happen for the end user.

I have used it for about nine years. My company has been using it for about six years.

We are on Linux, so we rarely have stability issues. We could run into resource issues, but that would be space or hardware related.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. Cognos is very good at scaling.

Vendor technical support could be improved. It used to be really great. However, it seems like the focus now is on newer development. The support may not be that good for the more difficult issues.

When I came here, they did not have another solution. In my past environment, they had Business Objects, but ended up switching to Cognos for the flexibility it provides.

If you are doing a standalone installation, then the initial setup is easy.

However, if you get into a distributed environment and load balancing, then it requires you to really know the application well. You need to know about the server level for all of the configurations.

Licensing has been simplified over the years. However, we do not like their Processor Value Unit (PVU) model and prefer the named user licensing route.

Pricing can be expensive depending on the number of administrators or developers. Regular consumer licenses do not cost as much. They also have a cloud solution.

If implementing on-site, you will need to have skilled administrators and developers who are experienced with this solution. They are in demand, so they will command a high salary.

Reporting, which includes building reports out of relational schema.

This product has made enhancements in building dashboards, incorporated changes to make it easier for the business users to import and use their metadata to do analysis. That is included in Cognos Analytics version 11. It is more user friendly and in some areas, you do not necessarily depend upon IT to build reports. There is one tool like Cognos Workspace Advanced, which is the hybrid of Query, Report and Analysis Studio.

Dashboarding: Actually right now in Cognos 10.2.2, Cognos Workspace is the dashboarding studio to build dashboards. But I believe some work still needs to be done in order to compete with other tools like Tableau, etc.

Tableau has in-memory capabilities and a lot of depth in visualizations. It can analyze and display a lot of intuitive data quicker. Also, Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau. However, the new version, Cognos 11, is a big step in that direction to make it more user friendly.

Dimensional Modeling Reporting: Dimensional Modeling is used for reporting where the reports can be drilled down to a detail level. It works on the same concept as cubes, except it is live. Performance is a big factor, so it requires lot of expertise to build the right kind of model with the proper aggregation level; otherwise, the performance is impacted. Plus, it requires MDX knowledge to enhance/maintain the model, because SQL doesn’t work in dimensional modeling.

I have used it for eight years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I encountered scalability issues when different users are querying at the same time or if one user is running a big report involving large query (SQL).

Technical support is 8/10.

Pricing and licensing is high. It can be lowered.

I didn't make the decision to choose this product.

It is a good product for reporting, not necessarily for dashboards.

The ability to interface with multiple server types (databases) to retrieve data and report on that data in an all-inclusive environment is beyond a doubt the best feature. The reporting interface takes getting used to, but once you familiarize yourself with it, you can create some truly amazing graphical and informational reports.

BI has allowed our product to become open ended as far as the client data is concerned. We have proprietary reporting that is standardized but doesn’t capture everything. BI expands that functionality to include any and all customization a client may have and still get their data.

The GUI for reporting isn’t very user friendly, so beginners struggle with feeling overwhelmed when seeing it for the first few times. I spent my first two years just getting used to where everything was and how to script simple things without looking them up. A better dictionary of examples for functions would have gone a long way with helping me.

They’ve improved it and it’s much better than it was, as well as the tooltips on the page, so I’m thinking they had similar feedback in the past. When I engage new clients on the product, though, they are almost always overwhelmed by the interface and I don’t have a good solution other than redesign. They could create a secondary Page Design pane that is simpler for beginners. They could even merge Query Studio with Report Studio, and as you familiarize yourself with the Query pane and need a little more functionality, you can flip to the Report Studio pane. I would prefer a secondary pane option over an entire redesign since I’m familiar with the current structure.

I’ve used Cognos BI for over seven years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I personally have had no problems with IBM tech support, though my experience is from a reporting standpoint not an implementation standpoint.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The only advice I can give here is that there are several third-party companies that will handle implementation as well as provide continued support post-production. I recommend doing your homework and hiring one of them to take care of implementation and support, if you don’t have a dedicated team to do so internally.

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

There is a huge cost up front to purchase and get it off the ground, but once you have it, you won’t regret it. To have access to all of your data at your fingertips is impressive and I think it’s a must have for medium and large companies (+500 employees).

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.

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.

Cognos contains many components that make up the entire Cognos suite.

The starting point is the meta data designer, which is Framework Manager.

Framework manager allows you to pull in database tables from any type of database, this is referred to as the ‘Database Layer’. Then you create the Business Layer where you update the column names with ‘business names’ and remove the geek speak or database names. You can also include data transformations and table joins in this layer. Finally you create the Presentation Layer that points to the Business Layer. The presentation layer is usually the only layer that is published in the Cognos package.

Cubes contain data hierarchies and time dimensions to allow a report consumer to ‘click and drag’ the data elements that they want to analyze to their reports.

Transformer is the product that allows you to pull large amounts of data together, to allow clients to slice and dice their data any way that they want. Report Studio allows for sophisticated reporting. Each of these is valuable; there is not just one that is more valuable than the other.

We developed sophisticated reports in the fundraising area, which pulls in data from many different databases and presents graphs, charts and summary financial information over any time period that the person wants to see. This set of reports are run or used on average 15,000 times per month by hundreds of end users.

Another example is building financial data using cubes. The cubes contain 11+ years of financial data and we have the add-in for Microsoft Excel, which allows end users to build their own ad-hoc reports for trending and analysis.

Right now, we are in the midst of implementing a brand new version of Cognos, named Cognos Analytics. This version is very, very different from prior versions. We are finding ‘undocumented features’ on a daily basis and reporting issues to IBM. We are working thru the issues, but it is very stressful on us, finding out functionality that was in the previous release but is missing now in Cognos Analytics version 11.

Here are just a few examples of issues that we are facing as of today! We have identified other issues, which have been resolved or we have workarounds.

- In our CA production environment, we imported reporting content that included saved output of financial reports. The saved output did NOT import and therefore users will not be able to pull up the reports in production! This works in our other CA environments, but failing in production!

When you have a saved output report that contains links to drill thru reports and you want to open them in a new browser window, it fails! You have to go in and modify the reports to open in the same window, so now the user cannot see the original report that they clicked on.

You also lose the ability to export reports to Excel or PDF when you have drill thrus to a new window.

If you run a report, have it emailed out and you attach a link to the report in the email, it fails only in our production environment.

The Search and Select prompt fails on the prompt page.

I have used it since 2005, so 11 years now.

The product is stable, but we continue to find issues due to the product’s newness.

The product is very scalable and can support thousands of end users. HUGE companies are using this product.

I rate technical support with a 8-9/10. We occasionally need to escalate issues to senior technical support.

I was an independent consultant and have used competing products; they all have their quirks. Here at the university, we for the most part use Cognos.

The initial setup can be complex for large organizations; for smaller companies, it is easier.

For the university, Cognos is very competitive, because IBM offers huge discounts to higher education. My advice would be to work with an IBM business partner.

Cognos was already installed here when I was hired. The university hired me for my experience.

Hire an experienced business partner, who can provide ongoing support and training.

I really appreciated Report Studio, because it can create complex reports fast!

Report readiness has really improved! Cognos provides multiple tools to help create reports. That helps provide clients with what they need ASAP!

Data Manager, InfoSphere, and Framework manager can be a little more user-friendly. But we are able to manage and learn from it. We can create data sources in order for the other data tools to function.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface. Sometimes it can be confusing to navigate through it.

I have used it for one year.

I have not had any stability issues. It is great software with great tools!

I have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support has been great. IBM has a wonderful support portal where you can submit tickets for issues that are way too complex to understand or control on your own. The fix central portal will get back to you ASAP and provide solutions to fix your problems.

The company has always used Cognos, as far as I know. Personally, I transitioned into this post when they were working with Cognos. I found the transition into Cognos to be easy.

I never encountered this issue, as it was already set up. We are currently in the maintenance and monitoring phase.

It is a great product. It is very simple to use and easy to monitor and maintain.

Various studios vary in the level of control they give you in putting together a report. As an example, I spend most of my development time in Report Studio. I have always been impressed by the level of control I have in how my reports look, behave, and allow interaction.

• Allowed the organizations I've worked for to standardize the information they deliver to hundreds of decision makers.
• Allowed insight into the operations and trends of the business with speed and accuracy.
• The toolset allows you to create a framework to deliver a range of BI solutions. These scale from high level strategic dashboards with key performance indicators to tactical and operational reporting for the day-to-day running of business activities.

Metadata documentation could be improved. While IBM Cognos tools allow you to document most aspects of the metadata layer, the way this information is stored and exposed for metadata management is too basic.

I have been using IBM Cognos for 17 years.

I have had no issues at all with stability. Cognos is one of the most robust products out there.

There are no issues with scaling this product to a large number of users. The technical architecture is such that scaling is handled easily.

Most technical support issues that I had were revolved in a prompt manner. The amount of information on the IBM knowledge base is impressive. The user community online is full of some brilliant ideas and solutions that I have used many times.

Most companies that I have consulted for had IBM Cognos in place for several years.

A lot of companies that I've worked with outsource the set up activity to IBM or a second-tier consulting firm.

In every case, it has proven to be a wise move. I've never seen the choice of machines or configurations become an issue later down the track.

My advice is to outsource what you are not in the business of doing every day.

Do your homework on the licensing that you require. The penalties and costs involved if you are audited for licensing can be expensive.

IBM does not allow you to trade or swap licenses. Most companies don't allow this either. The definitions of what each license holder is and requires should be clearly understood before entering into any agreements.

Some of their requirements around user licensing for those who were only consumers of reports (e.g., they have output sent to them by email) used to be fairly onerous.

When I've been involved with a software selection, the contenders were BusinessObjects, Cognos, and Oracle. Cognos won due to its broad coverage of features and solutions that it covers as well as the product maturity.

• Resourcing: Don't underestimate the resources required to build good business intelligence reporting and analytics. For example, if you skimp on training, you'll have a great tool set that is going to be used poorly by its user community. Businesses implementing IBM Cognos need to get the balance right in terms of who carries out what activity, especially who and where report authoring takes place. One of the companies I've consulted for gave little training to people in the business outside of IT. As a result, poor quality and slow executing reports were the result.

• Culture: Use these tools to promote the right culture. A lot of the benefit of using IBM Cognos will depend on your organization's maturity level with regards to its use and implementation of these tools and how you integrate their usage into your business processes and decision making. The culture has to be present to allow any BI tool to be successful.

• Ability to produce reporting solutions which are accessible on other devices (iPads, iPhones and Android).
• Ability to distribute interactive reports (Active Reports) to over 1400 recipients. It became too difficult to create reports on a portal page and have people access the portal to download their report, especially on devices like iPads and iPhones. Getting a consensus on the data that these “portal reports” had to display was also difficult for security reasons. The active reports allowed easier access to data (email distribution) and the ability to display more data without security concerns. Each report was tailored to its audience.
• Ability to produce self-service models and utilize self-service tools is a big advantage. I’ve successfully converted report-only data models into dual purpose, reporting, and self-service models without too many headaches. I’ve had success in training managers to use Workspace Advanced to generate their own reports. Some of the less computer savvy users had some difficulty at first.

• Active Reports: More detailed data is available to sales reps and management. The reports are configured for the rep/manager role with a focus on their own territory/market data. The reports are delivered to email, so there is no difficult and lengthy navigation to get the data to the recipient. The ease of use and access meant that more of the audience was utilizing the reports. The amount of inquiries, issues, and complaints was greatly reduced. We received a great response from everyone involved.
• Self Service: The demand for reports was much greater than our resources could provide. Being able to produce self-service models and deliver tools such as Workspace and Workspace Advanced was a huge benefit to my team and to the company as a whole. The fact that we could modify the current models with self-service style packages helped us to provide consistent, dependable solutions without having to “reinvent the wheel”.

When bursting a low volume report using a burst key, I would like the ability to copy myself on the reports. The Carbon Copy (CC) field disappears on the ‘Run with Options’ email option when a burst key is used.

Simple tweaks to some of the tools would increase productivity/development such as the following:

• Ability to control how reports generate queries to the server without having to use custom SQL.
• Ability to make changes to a calculation or column in Workspace Advanced without automatic validation.
• Allowing any object in Workspace Advanced to be moved/deleted. Lists become locked into place once placed on the page.
• Conditional formatting limitations in Report Studio resulted in more report versions for different audiences (Active Reports). We could reduce our 24 report versions down to 8 report versions with a more versatile formatting function.
• Formats are linked to specific data items within a specific query. Queries sharing the same data items should be able to share conditional formats.
• It would be beneficial to have prompts or other (render) variables to control formatting.
• Ability to ‘scroll lock’ in Report Studio: You create a list within a block and set the block to a specific size. The block allows the list to be scrollable within the report. This is useful when the report will be displayed on smaller devices like phones and tablets. When editing the list within this block, after every change is made, the focus returns to the top left of the block. This makes it time consuming to make simple changes to the list and ultimately making it difficult to keep focused on the changes.

We have used Version 10.2.1 for three years.

We encountered some minor issues. With Active Reports, we have a recurring HAL error that is being investigated by IBM at this time. It only affects 0.01% of our 1500+ outputs.

Other reporting tools such as Report Studio (standard reports), Event Studio, Workspace, and Workspace Advanced work well with no issues.

We encountered a scalability issue, but it has been addressed.

With Active Reports, the size of the data and complexity of our model combined with the size of our audience led to an additional month of development.

Ultimately, the Active Reports were generating far more queries than expected when bursting. In some cases, they produced temp space issues. Most of these issues were mitigated through aggregation, indexing, and partitioning.

We were able to streamline the Active Reports in the process which helped to a degree. The biggest gain, from what we understand, will be seen when we are enabling DQM. This is planned for 2017.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Response time tended to be a little slow, but their support team seemed to be very knowledgeable about the tools and best practices.

Some issues were resolved with “quick fixes”, not long term solutions which I didn’t like, but it worked.

Too many questions were answered with “upgrading to 10.2.2 will solve the problem”. This seemed to be IBM’s knee jerk reaction to uncommon, but known issues.

I would award them one point for their upsell tactic, one for their response time, and one for quick fixes versus long term solutions.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

I don't know about the initial setup as I was hired after it. Upgrades seem to take some time and some fine-tuning with IBM's assistance. There has been nothing out of the ordinary.

The standard user licensing is straightforward. It seems like they are expanding these licenses now to cover more of the tools so there is less complexity there. PVU licensing must be researched and understood before committing. The terms of PVU licensing seemed to be a little vague and confusing.

We discovered a great deal more by asking IBM some detailed questions. This will save us some headaches in the future.

We evaluated OBIEE and QlikView to the best of my knowledge.

Cognos provides a multitude of reporting options and I love working with it. I would recommend it as a reporting one-size-fits-all solution. If a simple reporting tool is all that’s required, other solutions might be more suitable.

• Report design
• Very flexible
• Intuitive
• Prompts capabilities, variables, and calculations
• Easy for authors to adapt and elaborate professional dashboards

It includes a dashboard developed for use in all branches across the country. This has improved their time to acquire the proper information to make decisions on a daily basis.

Nowadays, the finance team doesn't use Cognos as they should. They extract a bunch of data and create their spreadsheets all over the place.

With TM1 coming on board next year, this dirty job is going to be replaced by a centralized environment.

I have been using the solution for four years in my current job.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is good.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup is a little bit complex with regard to the IT procedures, but the installation is quite easy.

The price is a bit expensive.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

If you have the budget to implement, then do it.

As per the technology itself, it is a very powerful tool with a lot of options depending on the necessities. It is also scalable to the business needs.

IBM Cognos has allowed our company to manage all the data we generate and helped us improve the results.

The product user interface is already being remodeled to fit today's market. There is also room for improvement. IBM is trying to have a more mobile touch. I guess this is OK, if you are using tablets. But if you are using a PC, why should you have a mobile look?

I'm just thinking about a scenario on Microsoft Windows: With Windows 8, everything had the mobile look and feel. Now, with version 10, it has the same look as it always had before version 8, but it improved and I like it!

I have been using this technology for the past three years.

I did not find any stability issues so far.

I did not find any scalability issues so far.

I would give the level of technical support a rating of 9/10. I also think the support that IBM offers is very good. When we have an issue with the software, IBM has good resources to get the issue solved. There is a lot of positive information over the internet.

One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine. However, sometimes it can take up to one or two months. End-users are not happy when they have to wait this long for a solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You only have to follow the installation wizard screens, indicate where you want to have it installed, and click "Next".

You need to have a good idea of how many people will be using the product. It helps knowing how many of them should have full permission (admins), how many will be developers, and how many will be "just" consumers.

It is a very complete product that keeps getting better and better. It is complex software and you need a good level of expertise.

• Robust framework manager tool for querying
• Retrieving data from disparate sources into one model
• Can be used for creating views and SQL scripts.
• IBM administration for scheduling reports through multiple outputs
• Cognos roles and permissions can be created to give specified access to reports

• We have used this tool to retrieve data from the SQL Server, SSIS packages, and Oracle tables/views.
• We have built the FM model by creating views or query subjects as needed. Different reports can come from one model. This was used for relational and dimensional reports.
• We have created cubes which were built in Cognos transformer and then used as a data source in the model. This was used for creating dimensional reports using Kimball methodology (dimensional and fact tables). The surrogate keys were built by another developer using the IBM data modeler or SQL/Oracle. The dimensional model was used to create robust dashboards using the advanced workspace.
• We have used IBM Cognos Administration to deploy the reports/packages from one environment to another. Drilling through reports was used to go down to granular reports. Reports were given access per their Cognos role or LDAP access. (MS Active Directory was set up by another developer.) Different packages, such as the audit package, can give detailed information about the metadata.
• The entire process can be created in the IBM tool from source, to reporting, to administration.

• Report Studio: While using the dimensional model package, the reporting language could be made more user-friendly.
• Cognos FM could process queries faster
• IBM configuration errors should be detailed, instead of blanket errors
• Deployment of report/packages from one environment to another could be simplified

We have used this solution for more than seven years.

I have not worked on the server side, so I can't comment about stability.

I have no experience with technical support.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup process.

I was not involved in the licensing process.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

The use of the dimensional and relational data model for drill-down, drill-up and drill-through: This is how you can switch between analysis on a high-level, aggregated data and detailed data.

I have been a business intelligence and analytics consultant for 15 years and I have always provided value to my customers.

The improvement to make is for BI to be extended into analytics; more Watson technology in BI. Watson from IBM is for more predictive and prescriptive analysis (big data) and Cognos BI is for more descriptive (BI). When IBM brings the Watson technique into BI, you will have one platform for reporting over past, present and future.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

We have never encountered any stability issues.

We have never encountered any scalability issues.

Over the last 10 years, I have never needed to use the customer support.

Over these 15 years, I have worked with Oracle BI, Microsoft BI, Qlik and several other tools. Beside Cognos, none were compliant enough with the needs of my customers.

Starting with Cognos wasn't easy before the most recent version 11, Cognos Analytics.

Use one of the best BI tools, which Cognos is.

I have rolled into it by starting BI within Cognos.

First look at what you need, before buying a BI tool and implementing it.

• Metadata modeling: Easy and efficient
• Reporting: Generally quick
• Online report studio: Generally works well

• Automating common reports
• Standardizing metrics and reports utilized through the company
• Enabling efficiency through reducing manual report creation via Excel
• Offline data source use

Data visualization could use improvement as many competitors offer more robust options for charts. More interactivity could be useful here.

The speed in which reports run can also be a large issue unless servers are very well appointed. Queries must be optimized in some cases.

However, overall speed hasn't been a huge issue since Cognos, Version 10.

We have used Cognos in general for eleven years, and this version for over a year.

We encountered some stability issues. Often application servers need to be recycled once a month. Unless report writers are writing very clean queries, database cache cleanups and server recycles are necessary.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Usually support is good, but it all depends on the technician you get. I've had great experience with some people, but less than stellar experience with others.

The one thing that has been consistent with IBM Cognos support is if you have a very large issue affecting many users, they are quick to respond and support your issue.

At one company, we switched to SAP BI/BO due to wanting an all-encompassing solution.

The initial setup was not complex. There is great documentation. It has gotten better as Cognos has matured, but some documentation isn't updated as fast as you'd like if you're utilizing one of the latest versions.

I don't have any advice about these issues.

We evaluated Tableau and SAP BI/BO.

Always plan for a scalable implementation that allows for a growing user base. Bump the server memory and processors up as much as you can so you're over and above what is suggested for each version.

Look at the IBM documentation on the server setup and organize the step by step guides for each server in a distributed environment.

Ensure that the security setup and groups are well thought out before starting.

It is an enterprise solution. It provides scalability, reliability, security, and performance for large scale organizations. Without these features, it would become a useless tool for large organizations.

The tool identifies trends and anomalies before it is too late, i.e., before the end-of-the-year results. This prevents customers from getting angry and provides savings opportunities.

For versions 8 and 10, I would like to see better visualizations and geo-mapping.
Version 10 has out-of-the-box charts and maps that are very outdated, look old, and are static (not interactive).

There seems to have been major improvements on visualizations in Cognos Analytics (Version 11).

I have used this solution since 2001, with versions 6.6.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Sometimes technical support can be hit and miss. However, IBM has some very good technicians.

I used a different solution in a prior organization. They switched from Cognos to Business Objects. The decision was made due to the ERP provider (Epic) having some pre-built BI solutions. In order to keep the certification, my organization had to use their reports.

Cognos has come a long way. Fifteen years ago, the installation and setup was very complicated.

It is not difficult nowadays. However, the tune-up is still tricky.

Clearly define the levels of access and user groups to give access to tools and data. It is hard to change once something is in place.

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.

This version of Cognos combines a new modern interface and intent-driven data discovery, with the scalable, governed and managed architecture for which it has always been valued. Also:

• The ability to quickly get an engaging view of my data, with no scripting or SQL knowledge is a winner.
• The true common modelling layer (Framework Manager) ensures that data objects are re-usable across the business, lineage is easy to track, and reports can be protected from back-end changes.
• New releases are announced frequently, and it is constantly evolving.

Cognos Analytics allows our business the freedom of movement and self-sufficiency we require, while keeping the IT team happy that information is secure and easily sharable. A light data modelling tool allows business users to source and analyse their own data in a managed environment. This is the only tool I know of that keeps both business and IT teams happy.

As there are new releases every 3 months or so, enhancements to the new dashboards are regular being released. It would be useful though to be able to apply custom palettes, and change the spacing around each object, allowing dashboard objects to fit more snugly with each other.

We have used the solution since its launch in Dec 2015. I have been using previous versions of Cognos since 1996.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. The architecture is scalable via the use of separate gateways and dispatchers, and can be scaled to include many servers across multiple locations.

The availability of the new Cognos Analytics community allows for global sharing of problem resolutions. As this version is evolving rapidly, finding in-depth training material can be challenging.

We switched from ‘desktop data discovery’ tools to a more stable, scalable, enterprise ready solution, to allow for secured distribution to a broad and varied audience. Cognos Analytics provides a complete toolkit from quick discovery, endless visualisation options to enterprise-scale report delivery, through any medium (e.g. call-centre LCD screens, mobile, executive dashboards, financial reports etc).

The new installation is very simple. Wizard driven installation takes about an hour. It can get more complex to install a distributed architecture, but still not more than a day or two to install it.

The initial set-up price is higher than comparative tools, due to the base server component, but can be more cost-effective in the long run for a larger user base (> 100 users). Also, all features come standard, so add-ons are not required for printing, distribution etc.

We evaluated Qlik, Tableau, Microsoft BI.

Cognos Analytics allows for many ‘styles’ of deployment, and can be done simply ‘out-of-the-box’. To get the most from the product, explore the different features. Some creativity and thought should be applied on how to engage your audience in most interesting and intuitive ways.

• The ability to burst. It allows us to control the prompting activity and automate monthly reporting to our end users as we mass distribute to almost 900 end users.
• The GUI design interface is intuitive.

• We are able to rapidly communicate financial reporting and statements for reconciliation purposes.
• People are able to self serve with the provided authoring tools.

• The visualization tools have greatly improved but the active reports still need help.
• The build process of linking the variables can be a bit complex, especially for newbies.
• The ability to secure on the downloaded dataset that feeds the active report is prohibitive of its widespread use.

We have used the solution for seven years.

I would rate the technical support at about 5/10. We continue to struggle with IBM provided first or second time correct responses to cases we have open. Cases can drag on for months before resolution.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup was complex. We built scripts to create and configure at a redundant server level.

The prodict is expensive.

We evaluated Oracle OBIEE and Jaspersoft.

Investigate the cloud option for savings in maintenance and patching.

IBM Cognos Analytics is a data discovery and reporting platform for your department or your entire enterprise. But it's much more than just managed reporting: It provides departmental users with the self-sufficiency they need to bring in their own external data, explore it, and even merge it with corporately governed data, all without needing to go to IT. With that ability, they can get fresh perspectives that are simply not available in their existing reporting environment.

I will provide customer examples:

• Time savings on report creation and distribution
• Real-time data analytics to make real-time decisions to make or save money
• Eliminated silos of information for a true enterprise solution
• Offline reporting for executives
• Real-time dashboards
• Many others

IBM Cognos Analytics continues to improve with every release. On the horizon are some major enhancements that include:

• World-class mapping capabilities (This is now available with release 5. IBM partnered with Mapbox and now offer beautiful geospatial mapping capabilities)
• Connections to more data sources (with release this is greatly imporved.
• Storytelling features like Watson Analytics (available with release 4)
• Connections to Frame Work Manager packages for dashboards (available with release 5)

I have used IBM Cognos Analytics (Cognos 11) since it came out late last year (2015). I have used Cognos BI solutions for more than 20 years.

Stability has not been an issue with IBM Cognos Analytics – it is a very solid platform.

It is an extremely scalable product, across all distributed platforms.

Different levels of support are offered and level 1 has 24/7 support. On par with any software company.

I have always used Cognos BI products.

Setup is very easy. There are three options with this newest product that limit the involvement of a technical install specialist.

Work with an IBM partner like Lodestar Solutions to ensure you have the right mix of licenses and you are not over paying in support.

As an IBM premier selling partner, we constantly review other products. There are a number of fine products available; however, IBM has hit a home run with IBM Cognos Analytics.

Ensure your specific requirements are defined and that your data sources are clean. If you are not sure how to do this, work with a partner like Lodestar Solutions, who are experts in working with you to create an analytics roadmap.

• Advanced, enterprise-level data modelling
• Reporting
• Request routing
• Integrated security
• Auditing
• Jobs and scheduling
• Alerts and agents
• Content distribution

Centralised, balanced, scorecard-based dashboards with drill-through to detailed OLAP; datawarehouse; and operational reports keep the organisation focused on KPIs.

It is struggling to compete with the front-end ease of use and visual appeal of QlikView and Tableau.

I have used it for 14 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is good (7/10).

I did not previously use a different solution.

It is a mature, full-featured enterprise product and as such requires detailed configuration/administration knowledge to set up.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated SQL Server Reporting Services, Tableau, and QlikView.

It provides value for larger enterprises.

The most valuable feature is the ability to quickly build cubes with Cognos Transformer. Transformer has enabled us to consolidate millions of rows of detailed data into multi-dimensional cubes. It enable business users to drill down, and slice and dice data by key business dimensions, such as product, region, customer, and time.

It has provided visibility into our customers; specifically, it has given us insight into high-value customers.

The Cognos Suite needs improvement in a number of areas. First, the products must be made more user friendly for casual users. Next, business users need the ability to quickly pull in data from non-structured sources without the need for IT to model the data. Another area for improvement is advanced charting and graphical elements that you can use in reports and dashboards.

I have been using IBM Cognos since 2012.

PowerCubes has limits and thresholds. Developers need to be aware of these when designing a cube, and take into consideration the cube performance versus the physical size.

Report Studio for operational reporting against relational data sources is very dependent on the underlying database performance and the design of your metadata model in Framework Manager. Report designers and modelers must analyze the generated SQL and tune the Framework Model and reports.

The technical support is good.

I did not use any other solution previously.

Setup for a multi-server environment is of average complexity. Tuning the environment takes time.

Negotiate on licensing and support costs.

We have often reviewed the BI landscape. For Enterprise BI, we have looked at Cognos, SAP Business Objects and MicroStrategy. These tools are very similar and leapfrog each other with each release. Newer tools such as QlikView, Tableau, and Spotfire have gained momentum and taken market share from the enterprise BI vendors. You need to analyze your needs and determine whether an enterprise BI suite is right for you, or if you need multiple tools for different capabilities.

Plan your reporting strategy. Do you intended to implement self-service reporting so that end users are creating reports? Do you need structured operational and management reporting? Cognos often requires IT resources for metadata modelling. Will you have the bandwidth and time to move at the speed your business requires?

• I love the new user interface! Finally, Cognos BI has a new face.
• New handling of JavaScript.
• Story board.
• Dashboarding with combined shared and local data.
• Backwards compatibility.

Our client was very unhappy with the v10 and earlier UX. They wanted something "sexy". Our UX team came up with a very pleasing design mock-up of the dashboards using Marvel (www.marvelapp.com/1c19h7d). I despaired that it couldn't be done in v10.2.2. However, we got v11.0.4 installed, and amazingly I was able to get very close to the "sexy" UX the client wanted! This is being done using the reports functionality of Cognos Analytics (Report Studio + Workspace Advanced + Analytics Studio + Query Studio all in one, but with a better UX).

Also, the tool UX is more more easily customised in this version.

IBM has stated that Cognos Analytics 11 will include RAVE2/D3 charting support by the end of the year. I am using v11.0.4 and it is not included. V11.0.4 is the latest release TMK.

IBM has stated that Cognos Analytics 11 will include a mapping engine (like esri) by the end of the year. I am using v11.0.4 and it is not included. V11.0.4 is the latest release TMK.

I ported a complex dashboard built in Report Studio v10.2.2 into the v11.0.04 environment. After the embedded HTML items were removed so that Full Interactive Mode could be used, and replacing that HTML functionality with external JavaScript (via Custom Controls), the same report runs slightly slower. Also, after spending a day working in the editor on a report, the UI gets slower and slower. I either have to log off close the browser, then open a new browser and log on again to restore the start of day performance, or restart the BI service to achieve the same result. I was using Firefox 49. I’m now on 45 ESR but haven’t don’t enough work yet to see if this makes a difference.

I have hidden objects (block type “none”) on the page. To edit these I need to set the “show hidden objects” on in the options. This setting sometimes sticks between editing sessions, sometimes not. I opened two separate browsers and open a different version of the same report in each. In one the hidden objects displayed, in the other they didn’t.

I have used it for two months.

I've done three installs to date (two alone and one where I supported):

• Stand-alone on a Windows machine - easiest install ever!
• Concurrent install with C10.2.2 on a Windows machine - smooth with little confusion except around SSO and WebDAV. Used port 9305 as 9300 is for 10.2.2 install.
• Upgrade on a Linux machine - quick and painless.

I have encountered stability issues. I was able to crash the browser a couple of times (Firefox, recent version). I've tested the UI with Firefox (49 & ESR 45), MS 11, Chrome, and Edge (not supported), and all appear to work fine.

The longer I work on a report through the day, the slower the system responds.

Customer service is very good. Given that support is coming from Canada and I'm in New Zealand, a 16 hours time difference, I've usually had a response by the next morning.

The old Cognos Help Knowledgebase (pre-Rob Ash) was brilliant. The next version was so so. The move to IBM's DeveloperWorks means I struggle to find the information I need now.

We needed to connect to a PI Historian database but IBMCognos BI/CA does not certify the JDBC (Linux) driver. IBM said they would not provide a fix to support the PI drivers. The workaround is now to get PI data via a web service using IBM Integration Bus into a DB2 table, then read the data from there.

I previously used CBI10.2.2; upgraded to CA11.0.4 to get a better UX.

Initial setup was 99% straightforward; only complex in getting ports opened by a third party, implementing SSO, and WebDAV configuration.

An in-house team implemented it.

Cognos BI or Cognos Analytics comes bundled with many IBM solutions now. E.g, PMQ, Maximo. Check if your company has this supporting program license first before purchasing a new license. BUT, a bundled license is limited, so check the wording carefully.

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

If you go with Cognos Analytics, install at least version 11.0.4. It has backwards capability for old reports and dashboards, and includes the new JavaScript API.

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.

I enjoy the flexibility that the application has with Excel. Power users can use Excel functionalities for data analysis and reporting. Also, I like the integration with Excel (Xcelerator) and the ability to source data from numerous sources. Additionally, the use of Revelwood's Dynamo! allows for quick generation of reports.

The added power of Excel with Cognos TM1 allows my company to generate dynamic Excel-based reports to our customers much faster with the look and feel of Excel that they are accustomed to.

It would be more user friendly with GUI navigation. A lot of expertise is required to be able to navigate and perform simple tasks, as well as to create reports with Cognos TM1. I believe a GUI will make it easier for less technical folks (non-power users) to be able to use the tool effectively.

We’ve used Cognos TM1 for four years.

Performance of the product is usually stable and only has issues when there are lots of users during heavy reporting periods.

We have had no scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support 8/10. IBM has been pretty great with maintenance and technical support.

We have had no previous solutions.

The initial setup to install is pretty simple. You will need some technical experience to be able to successfully install the software components.

Licensing and pricing seems fair as compared to other products.

I don't know if the company evaluated other options. They were already using the product before I joined.

I believe it is important to evaluate similar products. I also advise to have a resident expert in-house to support and maintain the platform.

- We have worked with several reporting software products, and Cognos has a lot of flexibility and is very usable. It will perform most tasks that you would need.

Cognos software accesses several data sources and runs on major IBM platforms to help your business get the consistent data it needs. Also, Cognos software provides native interfaces to major ERP and legacy systems for fast access.

Cognos can improve in some data base basic connections (should be easier) mainly migrations in version 7.x to 8.x 10.x

No, because the Cognos platform has a number of features that are designed to ease administration and deployment, enhance performance, enable scalability and reduce the complexity of your BI environment.

No, scalability its very easy

IBM support is very expensive. However, there are many online materials to improve your skills, as well as other consultancies beyond IBM.

Yes, but these applications should not necessarily be changed. Home applications or simple BI tools can and should be used along with Cognos as most simple applications are not competitors. Many are even complementary.

Not very simple. It's important to get the advice of a qualified professional.

Yes, we should always be looking at other solutions in the market and competitors, it is mandatory, like TCO analysis.

2. Draw up a clear and effective communication with both the technical part and the internal and external staff

• Data modeling allows for better management and flexibility in exposing data from a single data model to diverse users.
• Flexibility of customization allows for designing custom solutions with ease.
• Scalability: It is very easy to add/remove a node in the Cognos cluster.

We have several reports that users access on a daily basis. We have also created multiple custom solutions to access reports from within an external application, as well as execute and deliver reports in a batch to a network location.

I think that IBM has done a great job with regularly improving this product and keeping up with the competing products. A couple of areas of improvement could be made in alerts for the application monitoring. It is hard to set up alerts when a servicer becomes unresponsive. The other improvement would be in improving the audit capabilities (including the database) of the application. The audit database is somewhat complex in developing good system usage reports.

I have used it for eight years.

I encountered stability issues, but it was more a problem in version 8. Starting from version 10, the stability issues have significantly reduced.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Cognos scales very easily and we have several options for scaling the environment.

Technical support is 6/10, more for the IBM partner from which we purchased the Cognos licenses. The challenge has been that most of the time, when you purchase it through IBM partners, because they are not the developers of the product, they have to go back to the IBM support and get the information and then relay it back to their customers; that adds extra time to solving the problem.

We have used this solution from the beginning, as it was part of the ERP purchase option.

Initial setup was straightforward. Cognos was very easy to install and configure and the documentation provided by IBM was very user friendly.

Cognos licensing is comparable to other competing products. IBM provides several licensing options such as named vs CPU licenses, and it is better to understand the current and future reporting needs before opting for any licensing option.

IBM Cognos was part of the ERP bundle that we purchased. Cognos was part of the package and was sold through an IBM partner.

Understand your current and future BI needs. Understand the information/insight you are looking to get from your BI application. Understand how you would calculate your ROI on your BI investment. Tool selection should be the last step in the development and deployment of any BI environment.

Consolidation capability; that's really all we use it for.

Moving away from a manual, Excel-based consolidation to a largely automated one has enabled us to reduce our reporting timelines.

Accessibility to and flexibility of consolidation rules / logic: Products like HFM are much easier to work with when one needs to change rules, etc. With Cognos, I find that a regular user needs a much better understanding of the control tables and the E rules than a regular HFM user needs of the rules file. There seem to be more steps involved in Cognos, and the order of those steps are also important. One almost has to tick a few dozen boxes in a particular sequence whereas with HFM, one just has to export the rules and do a Ctrl + Find.

The investment register is also quite painful to work with, but I suspect that's due to configuration issues.

All in all, I have used it for about 18 months.

I encountered stability issues. As with all databases, space management on the server is important; all of our stability issues are related to database size and available space.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I can't comment on the implementation; it was completed before I joined.

The pricing is good. It's fairly cheap compared to other products.

I understand HFM and SAP BPC were also considered before choosing this product. Cost and the relative sophistication of the user community played a big role on choosing Controller.

If one has a complex consolidation structure, regular M&A activity (and hence changes in structures and rules), unusual transactions and a large user base, then I would think twice about Controller. If not, it'll probably work fine.

• Metadata modelling using Transformer and Framework Manager
• Visualization using Dashboard

Normally for BI implementations, these are the critical aspects.

I have not worked for an organization who is a direct beneficiary of the product. I have worked for vendor companies who have implementation expertise or have worked for OEM.

• Data discovery-related features
• Visualizations
• Speed of interaction with end-user

There are no problems with these areas. IBM Cognos has been working on them, but they are not yet on par with other vendors who are leaders in data discovery. For example, features like Lasso, dynamic pivoting, etc. are not yet available.

I have used it for 11 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I encountered scalability issues while reporting across multiple data sources.

Technical support is very good.

I previously used a different solution, and switched because of ease of development and the rich set of features for most use cases.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I do not have much exposure to pricing. I understand it is on par, in terms of delivered value with respect to price, with other BI vendors.

Before choosing this product, I also evaluated Qlik and PowerBI.

Please evaluate other BI vendors available in the market to make sure that you pick the right tool for your use cases.

One of the features I find most valuable in the latest release is the Visual Storytelling functionality and being able to tell stories visually with your data. While stories are similar to dashboards in that they use visualizations to share insights, they differ as they provide a description over time and are actionable in nature.

This product has improved the way our organization and our customers truly interact with information, really putting the capabilities into the hands of the key decision makers and not having to rely on IT resources that do not have the business knowledge to do this for them; true self-service analytics.

The key areas for improvement are the administrative capabilities that are largely the same from the series 8/10 versions and the ability to use Framework Manager packages and models on new dashboards, etc. The introduction of data sets in the latest version demonstrates that this functionality is going to be offered around the corner.

While IBM Cognos Analytics has been on the market for under a year, I have been using the Cognos platform for nearly 15 years and have seen it continue to grow and mature.

I have not encountered any stability issues. The IBM Cognos platform has been around a while and with the right people doing the install/configuration/management of the environment, it is pretty rock solid. IBM is coming out with new minor releases every 2-3 months, which is great for customers as you can tell the commitment to excellence with the product is there.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support has been pretty responsive. I run an IBM Cognos professional services organization and we become the front-line support for many of our customers.

I have been installing/configuring IBM Cognos BI environments for years and I will have to say the documentation for the first iteration of IBM Cognos Analytics 11.0.0 was not complete and created a few challenges. The subsequent releases have been more complete and the latest version is pretty solid.

Pricing and licensing really comes down to what customers are looking to achieve, as there are lots of options out there. IBM Cognos Analytics offers a fully managed SaaS Cognos in the cloud offering, where a customer does not have to deal with infrastructure, maintenance, administration, or provisioning. This is a great option for many SMBs out there. For other larger customers, it comes down to the number of users, what roles they will have, and internal IT capabilities that they have. One of IBM Cognos’ greatest strengths is the ability to cover the whole spectrum of customers at a price point that is acceptable to all.

I led a large vendor selection process at a former company around 13 years ago where I had 10 vendors come in and do a product demonstration based on our business requirements and from there, I was able to narrow the field down to Information Builders and SAP BusinessObjects. For the flexibility, self-service capabilities, and in-memory OLAP functionality, Cognos was the clear winner for us.

I am a strong believer in having the right tool to do the right job. I believe IBM Cognos BI has been and continues to be a solution that I have seen great results in and continue to recommend. However, I recognize that there are strengths that other vendors bring to the table and solutions that could be a better fit in some circumstances.

It does a fantastic job of promoting true self service and allowing line of business users the ability to load their data without the need for IT involvement. Non-technical people can easily upload their data and start to perform analyses of their business creating attractive dashboards and asking key questions based on empirical data.

• Good reporting features: TM1 (for planning, plans vs actuals analysis, what-if analysis) and SPSS (for predictive analysis and other type of analytics).
• Integration capabilities: broad enterprise integration feature set, useful APIs and SDKs.

Self-service analysis features have improved a lot, even with new subversions of version 10, but I feel business users can't really utilize these features as they are not too intuitive and they easily find themselves lost among Cognos Studios. Query Studio is easy to use, but you can easily reach its limits. Analysis Studio is for OLAP analysis and it's quite easy to use, but OLAP needs a predefined multi-dimensional data source. Report Studio has lots of power, but it's too complex for a business analyst to use. Cognos Workspace aims to provide some self-service capabilities, but it's good for dashboarding only. Cognos Insight has been designed to close this gap, but it's quite a new solution; therefore, it lacks some complex analysis features.

Another area for improvement is error messaging. When an error occurs, the user has two options: the user gets a message that an error occurred, logged and please contact the admin, OR you get a long Java exception that you don't understand if you are not both a Java developer and a Cognos architecture expert (so there is a big chance that you will never know why the error happened).

I have been using Cognos BI version 10 since 2011, and previous versions since 2003.

Stability depends on many things, e.g., the quality of the Cognos model, the stability of the data source, the stability of the Cognos server environment, the stability of the network between the server and client application, the amount of data in the report/analysis, etc. Stability can be increased with a good initial setup and a thorough stability test of the Cognos BI environment. But it might happen that a user receives a strange and unidentifiable error message due to stability issues.

Scalability depends on the scalability of the source database system and the BI system, as well. Cognos BI can be scaled well, but the scalability of the source database system is more important in most cases, especially when a huge amount of data should be reported/analysed.

Technical support has two levels: first-level support is provided by an IBM support partner. So the quality of the first level of support depends on the experience and the quality of service of the support partner. Second-level support provided by IBM can be slow, especially when a competent IBM technical expert can't be found in your country.

I have seen some cases when an existing BI solution has been replaced by Cognos. It had various reasons but in most of the cases, the existing BI solution was outdated or the customer was disappointed with the existing BI product or simply the IBM salesperson performed well.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the product variant itself (for. ex., Cognos has an Express version, which can be set up really easy), and it depends on the planned BI architecture as well. So it can be really easy and it can be really complex, too.

Cognos BI has role-based licensing, so think well about which BI role you really need, and whether you should buy user- or CPU-based licences.

I always advise to use the right product to your specific needs, and evaluate some other options as well. Cognos BI can be a good fit for you in one case, but it might not be the best solution in another one.

Look for a good implementation expert who can help you make it a success. And don't spare on trainings; it's a complex, enterprise BI product.

Powerful Report Studio and Event Studio: We have stringent requirements for the reports that go to investors. Report Studio helps us to deliver pixel-perfect reports in both HTML and PDF formats. Event studio is such a powerful tool: We have over 400+ reports going out every day based on different conditions; a few are periodic, a few are based on availability of data, etc. Without Event Studio, it would be a nightmare to maintain these huge jobs.

Even though I identified Event Studio as one of the most valuable features, it still has room for improvement. Sometimes events get stuck; we need to restart Cognos services and do clean up in order to clear the queue. Error messages are not that straightforward.

The other area that needs improvement is Cognos Workspace. When we add multiple reports to the workspace, the performance is not up to the mark.

Another area of improvement is ‘interactivity’. Cognos is not even comparable from the interactivity perspective with other reporting tools such as Tableau.

I have used it for over 7+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Cognos is very scalable. We could have a distributed installation (which we are already using) with multiple content managers and application tier components; we have never faced scalability issues.

I would say technical support is good, not great. We have contacted support for a number of issues. The main thing tech support needed was to replicate the issue at their end, which is not always possible. We still have issues that tech support is unable to address.

We were using Microsoft reporting services as our reporting solution.

Initial setup was quite complex. We started with a single-server installation, and faced performance issues; then, we tried a distributed installation. A distributed installation is quite complex, especially when the requirements are high, such as AD integration, load balancer support, enabling single sign on, etc.

It is a very good product. I feel the price is OK, as it is not just a tool but it is a reporting platform.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options. However, we did evaluate a few others recently for some other requirements. We figured out that MicroStrategy is also at par (or even on a bit higher side in some features), but considering the tradeoff between the features, price and effort to migrate, we felt it is better to go with Cognos.

This is a best-in-class reporting platform. But keeping in mind the high price of this tool, it is better to evaluate it before going for it. You might not need all the features provided by this tool, in which case you end up paying more. Also, it might not be suitable for small firms.

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.

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.

It is used for customized reports. It is the only tool supported by our IT group for user reports.

Customized reports are valuable because you can probably create any report you could imagine with it. It has features we are constantly learning how to use. It does allow the users to pull their own data, provided they are given a good framework/datasource that has been created with the options they need to use.

Currently, we just use it for user-requested reports. It has more features that, if we had the manpower, we could better set up the tool so users could do their own reporting. IT here are just getting around to letting users do their own reporting.

More flexibility for joining data sources within reports would be nice. It seems to be a feature IBM is slowly developing.

We have several framework/packages created. For example, we have one for sales, one for shipping, one for manufacturing, etc. You go to create a report in sales, but the one table that you need is defined in the manufacturing package. You can’t join the two packages in Cognos. Someone has to create the table on the sales package in Framework; then, it can be used in the report.

I have used it for three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We purchase support from a vendor because support from IBM is more complicated and seems to take longer. Our vendor knows us and can respond faster.

My company was using this software at least 10 years prior to me joining.

I wasn’t at my company for initial setup. We have consultants do the upgrades, because they do tend to be complex and we are short on manpower.

It is very expensive… You have to determine if the complexity of software you are getting is worth the price you are paying; how many bells and whistles do you need for what price. And if you don’t have the manpower to implement all the features, is it worth the cost?

I wasn’t at my company when they chose it, but I think it might be beneficial to re-evaluate the options.

Make sure you realize the scope of the product. It is not easily maintained by one or two people. It involves more than just Cognos for report writing; you also need to use Framework to create the data models/packages to use with it. I have done IT for 30 years; it is one of the more complex report writing tools I have used.

Also, make sure you are in it for the long haul with the costs that are associated with maintaining the software.

It is great for delivering self-service BI to our end users. It provides great flexibility in the types of BI output formats that can be delivered.

It has allowed end users to explore data without having to copy it into Excel first.

The upgrade process is always a challenge, as it is basically a reinstall each time.

I have used it since 2010.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support from our vendor partner is great.

We previously used Oracle Discoverer, but it reached end of life.

Initial setup was complex in the sense that there were different ways to deliver BI: relational models, DMR, and cubes. When you first start using it, it is difficult to know which is the best.

Haggle and buy near the end of IBM’s financial year.

Before choosing this product, we looked at SAP BusinessObjects, OBIEE, Pentaho, Jaspersoft and QlikView; all in 2010.

Get a good local partner or take on an experienced Cognos contractor to help get your local team up to speed and be productive.