Aberdeen vs. Explorium vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

Aberdeen's research and consulting services might be well suited for: - Companies looking to improve their sales and marketing performance. Aberdeen's research and consulting services can help companies understand the best practices and strategies being used by leading companies in their industry. This can help them identify areas for improvement in their own operations and take action to drive growth. - Companies looking to stay informed about emerging trends and technologies: Aberdeen's research can help companies stay informed about emerging trends and technologies in the sales and marketing field. This can help them make strategic decisions about how to adapt to changing market conditions. However, here are some scenarios where Aberdeen's services might be less appropriate: - Small or early-stage companies with limited resources: Aberdeen's services can be quite expensive, and may not be a good fit for small or early-stage companies with limited resources. - Companies looking for a free service: Aberdeen's research and consulting services are only accessible to clients that have a subscription and some users may not have the budget to access the research, this may limit the access to a specific group of clients.

Incentivized

We need to constantly measures costs in our health business and we forecast pricing acoording to several values and conditions. Explorium works quite good analysing simple datasets, but when hierahies start to increase, meaning 6-10 olap variables, the system start to slow down quite a bit until was no longer to retrieve the info we required. This is why we test several tools, because even world-class solutions we purchase, don´t do the job we need. Explorium is a good tool, but complexity will be a minus in some scenarios.

Incentivized

Well suited: Financial reporting - It can handle complex, pixel perfect, muti-page reports with scheduled delivery to stakeholders (like sales report by region on quarterly periodicity) Operational dashboard across departments - It can combine multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, excels etc) with filters, and embedded AI insights Less appropriate: Live dashboards - As stated earlier as well, IBM Cognos Analytics doesn't suit well for live dashboards or event driven data. For ex: live web traffic data or IOT device data, etc Data science - Although IBM Cognos Analytics is great tool for data exploration but it should not be used as a substitute for Python or R, which has edge over advanced modelling and stats based workflows like predictive modelling or clustering

Incentivized

• Data ready for consumption.
• Good enough relationships between entities.
• Nice integration with other players. That's a good thing.

Incentivized

• We can make dozens of dispatchers all focusing on different types of workloads.
• Friendly user interface, without the need for coding or complicated editing.
• Highly functionality reporting tools.
• We can easily create trigger when a certain threshold are met sending reports or alerts to needed parties.

Incentivized

• relationships between entities could be better. Would be great to have scenarios.
• The data normalized needs improvement. Works pretty good, but it needs more refinement when using AND-OR Formulas that came from various datasets.

Incentivized

• IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
• Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.

Incentivized

For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.

We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.

Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point

Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.

Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.

Incentivized

Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.

The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us

Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.

The simplicity of the tool is an advantage. The integrations as well work quite well. All these solutions have worked well until some point and what we have discovered over the years is that we need to combine various solutions. There is no such thing as one tool ruling them all. Explorium works quite well until we start testing more advanced relations, and here, the tool is promising but requires a little work.

Incentivized

Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.

Incentivized

The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.

• Positive. The time save in analysis per hour of internal consulting was the best compared to our SAP and Cognos solutions.
• In term of objetives works as stated, but when using multi-conditions of dataset, start the issues.

Incentivized

• We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios.
• Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis.
• Has mobile application which works seamless.
• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.

Incentivized