IBM Cognos Analytics vs. Jedox

With the help of IBM Cognos, the sales division can analyze sales performance, sales trends in top-performing areas, etc. It also helps in financial planning, like forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis. It also helps increase supply chain performance by analyzing it. It should be easy to use for small-scale data analysis. MS Excel is very useful for small-scale data analysis.

Incentivized

Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web. It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).

• Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
• Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
• Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.

Incentivized

• Using the Excel add-in means that our team was almost instantly productive, being able to use a familiar interface to present and manipulate data.
• Allows us to quickly do analysis and comparison of current and historic data.
• Really good to produce meaningful management reporting that can be adapted responsively to business requirements.
• Implementing Jedox in our budget cycle dramatically reduced the time and complexity of the process, while making it more transparent.

Incentivized

• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Laptops get overheated when the tool is used from moderate to heavy use. Also, there is a lag in the tool times.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.
• Lot of scope to improve the customer support & its not upto the industry standards.

Incentivized

• Diversity. Jedox can be applied to many different use cases from small to large deployments and from budgeting to enterprise class BI solutions. But rarely is one tool able to fulfill all of these requirements in one organisation. This value proposition can be complicated for prospective users.
• Awareness. Jedox punches above its weight in capability and scalability, but not enough people have heard about it and therefore procurement processes can be drawn out as a result.

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.

For a period of 5 years all our customers using Jedox have renewed their licenses.

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.

To me Jedox deserves 10/10 because it is a consistent one-in-all platform with a modern look and feel. It is intuitive to use and allows you to make intuitive applications integrating traditional business intelligence with performance management functionality. It certainly has a short
learning curve, especially for those that are familiar with MS Excel. An example: I've lost count but Jedox it is available in more than 25 languages. Another: Jedox does not require programming skills... it is developed to be used by the business.

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

Jedox has
very few bugs. Reports are available through an Excel add-in, the web and/or
mobile device (IOS/Android). In my opinion, availability also means high
performance, not having to wait for the system to give you the required reports,
analysis, dashboards instantly.

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.

Jedox is the fastest OLAP tool on the market. It can use GPU cards to increase performance even more

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

Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.

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.

The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.

Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization options for reporting and dashboards. Cognos can smoothly integrate with IBM products and other third party data sources whereas Sigma Computing provides integration with cloud data warehouses and data lakes

Incentivized

Calumo is similar product to Jedox. I have used it extensively in my previous role. It was a major contender when we evaluated a BI platform for NIDA. Calumo is a great product as well and it was a very close call. Where we found Jedox to be a better fit for NIDA was the ability to prepare dynamic reports with ease without the need to learn MDX which was used extensively by Calumo to make dynamic reports which expand or shrink based on the underlying data. Another major benefit we saw in Jedox was the whole ETL process could be managed within Jedox instead of doing it in SQL server which negates having a dedicated SQL specialist role when the scale expands.

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.

Scalability is often another word for speed. Given enough data, enough users or enough calculations, the tool becomes slower and slower. You will find that Jedox has a very high performance that can even be increased by the use of grafical cards. Other thaen that it does not only offer BI (looking back based on historical ERP data) but also allows you to look forward through integrated budgetting, planning, forecasting, workflow and collaboration. Not easy to find a tool that can support so much business functionality. So, also pretty scalable in that respect.

• Easier access to data and enhanced visualization models that allow the users to look at data in new and creative ways
• More efficiency in creating Management reports that Management can use to make decisions
• Enhanced collaboration: Rather than having 3-4 analysts work on individual reports they can come together and collaborate on one final product

Incentivized

• Financial budgeting and Forecasting are done in a centralized fashion in Jedox now instead of a decentralized excel based approach. A lot of cost savings and improved reliability
• Easy to use self-help Dashboards and detailed reports
• Web-based reporting instead of excel based

Incentivized