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.
$10
per month per user
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Reveal embedded analytics enables teams and customers to drive data insights with embedded intelligence, transforming the user experience of apps.
Built with embed in mind first, on modern architecture, Reveal’s API aims to remove the complexity of embedding analytics into applications. Reveal’s native SDKs can be integrated into applications on any
platform and tech stack including: .NET Core, Java, NodeJS (coming soon), and
front-end technologies such as React, Angular, WebComponent,…
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).
As a company responsible for people money we have to deal with following challenges every day: Clients who want to track the status of their transfers. Licensing agencies who need to ensure professional standards are met. Internal team managers who need to track client and staff progress to ensure company progression and success. Reveal does a good job as self-service tool enabling the accountable parties to have full access to important insights 24/7. The prebuilt dashboard themes save time and investment as we don’t need to hire a dedicated data analyst. The interactive dashboards give full transparency. The ability to easily create, analyze and report keeps clients, partners and stuff on the same page.
Ease of Use - Reveal is super intuitive when it comes to creating dashboards. You don't need to be a data expert, which is key for me.
Sharing - The ability to share across our teams, locations, and with clients is great. We create teams for our different clients and share dashboards there that also are connected to our company dashboards.
Support and Roadmap - Reveal support has been great. They care about the needs of their customers. They have released 3 updates in the last few months, and they are adding a lot of value.
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.
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.
As a developer of the project, I feel comfortable with this tool for its peculiarities: acceptable costs, simple configuration, creation and maintenance of simple reports, fairly complete account management, also, not least, I appreciate the work done by their technical support always timely intervention and, above all, resolutive. Furthermore, as far as end users are concerned, I found a good appreciation of the proposed reports
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.
Reveal has a great usability for any level of computer user. The only major thing I see that is not exactly user friendly, is the color scheme issue I stated earlier in my review. Although, I am coming from a graphic design background, I need a platform that every team member in our office can use.
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
This assessment is due to the fact that I have not yet found Reveal not available for use. Apart from some problems of development crash, then fixed by the product assistance service, I have not found any particular problems or loss of time caused by the instrument.
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.
The pages load rather quickly even in the presence of several elevations in the same dashboard that insist on different data sources and with visualizations that insist on different types of graph. I can only be satisfied with these performances.
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
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.
None in particular, however, would be welcome if improvements were made in the personalization of the prospects and in the connection between them (perhaps being able to transfer the selections present in one prospect to another recalled by the first).
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.
While Reveal is relatively pricey, it offers some of the best features I would say it is more resourceful than most competitors. Being resourceful means it is more capable and delivers better reports - comprehensive reports.
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.
This evaluation is the result of the fact that I have not had the opportunity to deepen the Reveal interface with other tools and / or other software, so the evaluation that I am giving follows what I have been able to read regarding the characteristics of the product online.
