Gavagai vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

Gavagai is well suited for a B2C business that receives a lot of customer feedback in a form of open-ended text. It makes life easier for the customer experience team to efficiently identify the strengths and areas of improvement for the business. It saves a lot of time and also the hassle of analysing text data manually. It is not just a word cloud tool that shows you the words with the most number of mentions. Gavagai directs you towards actionability.

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

• Simplifies text data.
• Lets you customise your dashboard.
• Sentiment analysis
• Supports 47+ languages

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

• Auto generated filters based on the data uploaded.
• Adding more Indian regional languages.
• Competitive pricing

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.

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.

I didn't evaluate many options while choosing Gavagai, I had explored a few local vendors whose capabilities were either incomplete or were not up to the mark. Their customer support was also quite poor. Also, the tool was debugged enough which led to frequent crashing. Alchmer although is not a direct competitor to Gavagai, since it's more of a customer feedback tool with additional capabilities of text analytics. I found Alchemer to be extremely expensive. Zonka on the other hand was quite welcoming to feedback from me and promised to develop additional capabilities for my specific requirements although the plan didn't go through due to internal reasons.

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.

• Helps save man hours.
• Reduces the effort required to analyse big data.
• Helps to act upon areas of improvement faster.
• Indicates the strengths or things that are particularly liked by your customers.

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