Domo is a full self-service business intelligence software that combines several data analysis and reporting tools into one platform. It helps users connect to multiple data sources, create robust visual reports, manage their data, send messages in real-time, manage projects, and develop new apps.
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IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 8.2 out of 10
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IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
At the end of the day, end-user adoption and taking the burden of IT to build reports was my goal. Demoing and testing many BI tools, DOMO is the one that allowed both to happen.
I believe you can’t compare the two just based off of data sets. Domo does allow room for customization and Cognos has a huge data set. It would be great to be able to pair the two.
IBM Cognos comes close to Data Central. It has some pros & cons over Data Central. Pros: 1. We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very much in line with real-life scenarios. 2. Has a mobile application that works …
I believe that companies that record large amounts of data about their product, service employers KPIs, etc, can make the best out of Domo for reporting and data analysis, but if a company handles little data and is not recording this consistently, it will not be of much use.
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).
Exceptional Transform area of the platform - any/all raw data can be manipulated and combined to create datasources that are very useful for our departments.
Visualization layer is clean and is very business presentable. Its simple but includes depth. Visuals can be created/used by all roles throughout our firm, its not limited to analysts.
Ability to communicate and talk about insights in the data - the communication tool is exceptional. I can @ mention specific users to bring attention to a discovery. I can start a private chat. I can annotate and communicate what I am seeing. I love it.
Mobile experience is excellent. When I am on the road i can actively monitor and engage with my team due to my Domo dashboard on my mobile device. Its amazing to run the business and not worry while away from the office.
Copying Reports - In Excel or Google Sheets, I like to make copies of similar reports and modify them as necessary for users. In Domo, makes copies of reports (called cards) but all copies are connected. So if you adjust the copy, it changes the original. This means a user has to recreate the report from scratch and then adjust it.
Unforgiving SQL - Domo does allow users to write their own SQL codes, which is great. However, Domo's SQL code is pickier than the other SQL database I've used (Metabase).
Text Alerts - Domo's alerts aren't always the smartest. Some of my dashboards are about the sales teams monthly performance and I get notified when there is a change of more than 20%. I always get notified at the start of the month that reports have changed from 'x' number to zero. This is expected because it's a monthly report and I hate getting texts about it. The only reason I don't term them off so I can be aware if something breaks in the middle of the month.
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.
Domo is a great up-and-coming product. There are many fantastic features that are extremely compelling to our end users, which makes Domo a great fit for our organization. As with many BI tools, there are items on the wish list that could make implementation, administration and usage easier, but I believe these will be addressed over time as the product matures and evolves. The overall concept and approach of this solution has definitely raised the bar in this area of expertise and I would like to see things advance in giving the enterprise tools that will make decision making easier and more robust in the future.
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.
The built-in user support and intuitive design of Domo makes it simple to learn and use. I find I can spend hours drilling deep, or else quickly gain an overview in just a few minutes. This is a great advantage since the flexibility fits well with the demands of my role. I enjoy using Domo since I know it will give me comparative data across almost every variable I might want to explore - I look forward to it!
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.
Pretty responsive. It took a while to get a response in selecting data points for our particular cards. Might have taken about a month? I am not sure if this was something on our end or Domo's end. But haven't had any other issues yet that required additional support from Domo.
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.
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
It is a true web-based application so implementation is much easier and smoother compared to other non-web based BI solutions. Also, they offered consulting services during the implementation process, which was helpful. Also, they provided lots of on-demand training courses and videos, which I liked.
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.
At the end of the day, end-user adoption and taking the burden of IT to build reports was my goal. Demoing and testing many BI tools, DOMO is the one that allowed both to happen.
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.
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.
I mentioned a "previously un-analyzable" dataset that we were able to visualize in Domo - the result was business re-alignment for increased productivity, cost savings and ROI.
It's tough to quantify the ability to provide insights that have been desired for years but not possible - we continue to amaze our executives and product managers with the analysis we can provide.
