ClicData vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

We used ClicData dashboards in a somewhat unorthodox way: we used "Indicators", or icons within tables to represent data, and the results looked great. The ability to integrate 3rd party HTML into dashboards was valuable (although Clic Data correctly warns that response time may suffer). The ability to start small and release dashboards incrementally suited our needs very well. We also valued the responsive account team getting us quickly pointed in the right direction.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

• Ease of use, I can put together a dashboard in about an hour that is used by daily.
• Support, their support team is super helpful and always has detailed insight.
• Connectors, they have a huge number of connectors that allow easy integration of your data sources.

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.

Incentivized

• More widgets.
• Sometimes it takes a while to refresh.

Incentivized

• 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.

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.

Like I mentioned before, the ease of use means we not only get very quick results and beautiful dashboards in minutes, it means my team is actually using it because they aren't frustrated in the learning curve or wasting time trying to accomplish simple tasks.

Incentivized

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.

We've only needed support a couple times in the beginning as we were learning the system and how to display our data in interesting ways. Every time we reached out we got very detailed responses and were connected to someone that you could tell was very interested in making sure we were happy with how things were going.

Incentivized

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.

ClicData was the most flexible. It is cloud-based and even has WebService access. You can publish your data for access from other applications. The sheer number of data connectors is amazing. The ability to not only create dashboards, but you can schedule them to be delivered to specific recipients on a scheduled basis via PDF or a static HTML page.

Incentivized

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.

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.

• ClicData was by far the most reasonable cost-wise, and we were able to get ROI within just minutes of using it.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized