Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) vs IBM Cognos Analytics

• Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
• Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
• Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.

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• What IBM Cognos does really well is provide precise data that may otherwise be hard to retrieve from your primary accounting software. While doing so, it organizes this data such that it becomes much more meaningful to analyze.
• IBM Cognos also does a fantastic job through the Query Studio module to give certain users the ability to create simple reports and modify existing reports, this allows the flexibility a user needs in getting the intended data.
• IBM Cognos also provides the ability to utilize a BI tool for complicated reporting requirements or in cases when there are many data dependencies that exist. This BI tool enables Cognos to tackle many organizational and data challenges that companies face in the industry.

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• Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync.
• Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design.
• Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed.
• Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have.
• Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration.
• Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly.

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• With the upgrade from Cognos 10 to Cognos 11, there were a lot of features, like run schedule once, weren't brought over to the newest version of Report Studio.
• I felt like they were trying to chase Tableau and Qlik with dashboarding rather than focusing on their bread and butter of Report Studio or which other Business Intelligence tools don't do very well.

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• we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
• i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.

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• (+) increased efficiency: Less time trying to figure out how to do something w/ another BI tool that may seem impossible -- Cognos will be able to do it 99% of the time
• (-) increased training required: Training for Cognos had to be longer and more intensive than other BI tools. For example, my team members go through a week long 8-hour/day class and it was just enough to scratch the surface. A good base if required, but real world experience is the only way to become a Cognos pro.
• (-) more end-user training: We do mostly canned reports with Cognos, so out end-users must be trainied. It is much harder to train them with Cognos than other BI tools. This is why I only turn to Cognos if I cannot accomplish my goal in another tool.

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