Likelihood to Recommend Clari works well for sales and executive leadership teams that perform at a high level and collaborate well together. Everyone utilizing Clari needs to understand that it will provide the company with the information it needs to make strategic business decisions. It can not be seen as a more sophisticated way to manage
SFDC information. If the company is truly dedicated to improving its forecasting capabilities, then Clari could be worth the investment. If it is just being used to capture sales leaders' forecasts, you don't need Clari. Overall, Clari is a great capability, but you need a good business case to justify the expense.
Read full review Our first and most basic scenario was to automatize the creation and publication/sharing of business reports that used to be created manually by employees throughout our organization. Using Cognos for that first use case worked well. The advanced analytics functionalities we used on the aggregated data were also as expected. However, the user interface is not always intuitive, and there is a steep learning curve, so I would recommend Cognos only to large organizations where there is a need for the most advanced functionalities (AI analysis/prediction).
Read full review Pros Sales pipeline management: Clari provides real-time visibility into the sales pipeline, enabling sales teams to track the progress of deals and make informed decisions. Revenue forecasting: The platform integrates with existing sales and marketing tools, giving organizations a comprehensive view of their sales pipeline and enabling accurate revenue forecasting. Advanced analytics: Clari uses machine learning and advanced analytics to provide actionable insights into sales performance and help organizations make informed decisions about their sales strategy. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Forecast screen could be easier to interact with. I believe UI's that make users scroll horizontally lead to confuse and missed content since we rarely scroll horizontally on the internet. It's not as natural Enablement; I am confident my team is underutilizing Clari and that there are many more features that we should take advantage of. For example, the Dashboard screen looks good but in our company, our practice is to use the forecast and opportunity tabs instead. Reps and managers could benefit from a 30 min or 1-hour training session quarterly I like the opportunity score tracker but it would be great to know more of what comprises the score instead of feeling that it is just an AI. Perhaps giving the user more opportunity to validate or put their own spin to the score Read full review Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data. Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support. It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability Clari is very good when it comes to usability as I'm accessing it on daily basis as long as I'm on my Notebook, it helps a lot having visibility on my business status and progress on achievement. I can estimate my weekly, monthly, and yearly opportunities closure and revenue. I have some saved views which are so useful to get what I want to see.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Clari is very willing to jump in and build out use cases. They will work to do anything for you. That said, their follow up is not great. We have had to reach out for follow up several times on a project, which is still not complete. I wish they taught us how to complete what we want, rather than doing it in house for us
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating The Clari professional services team was great and kept us on our timeline. No complaints. Nothing amazing to report.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Clari was selected due to the flawless integration with
Salesforce , updates are made in real time. Being able to monitor everything at a scalable level has also been critical for our team. For example, we have different views established that show the rep level, manager level, director, customer segment. This eliminates unnecessary forecast/pipeline meetings
Read full review In the past Management had used Excel and
Workiva capabilities to create the reporting dashboards that were being used to make decisions. Since switching to IBM Cognos Analytics the Company has been much more efficient and decision making has been streamlined. IBM Cognos Analytics was chosen due to its reputation and data visualization capabilities and neither have been wrong.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We have significantly decreased the number of overdue deals in our funnel. We stay on top of deals within the pipeline much better now, since there is more transparency and accountability. This has sped up our sales cycle and our funnel is much more clean. Read full review High ROI with well designed solutions. Supported by scalable deployment, robust security model and ability to create valuable content. High ROI where well designed data models can be deployed with a common metadata layer to a variety of users and use cases. High ROI in an environment that includes a variety of vendors and best of breed products within the overall platform Read full review ScreenShots