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
Jitterbit
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Jitterbit is a cloud integration technology for cloud, social or mobile apps. It provides accessibility for
non-technical users, including easily creating API’s and data transformation scripts within the
integrations.
Well suited: Financial reporting - It can handle complex, pixel perfect, muti-page reports with scheduled delivery to stakeholders (like sales report by region on quarterly periodicity) Operational dashboard across departments - It can combine multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, excels etc) with filters, and embedded AI insights Less appropriate: Live dashboards - As stated earlier as well, IBM Cognos Analytics doesn't suit well for live dashboards or event driven data. For ex: live web traffic data or IOT device data, etc Data science - Although IBM Cognos Analytics is great tool for data exploration but it should not be used as a substitute for Python or R, which has edge over advanced modelling and stats based workflows like predictive modelling or clustering
This is a great tool for bringing data out of your locked, internal systems and getting it into the cloud. It meshes well with Salesforce and is fairly easy to use, helping the transition from other older, more complex tools into a more modern environment. It has lots of competition in this space and some are better than others, but if your data is straight forward and you know it well, Jitterbit will get the job done. If you are not as close or comfortable with your data and need to do some wildly complex migrations, there might be better packages out there for you.
IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.
Migrating operations from QA to Production work well for initial deployment, however, when migrating an update to an existing job to production, sometimes certain project items are duplicated. This is not the end of the world... the duplicates can be removed, but would be nice if it was not required.
I have not found a way to trap under-the-covers SOAP errors (for example, when a query you are running against Salesforce takes too long). You get a warning error in the operation log that the job only pulled a "partial" file, but it does not fail.
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.
I have been evaluating other tools as a continuous improvement practice. I would like something that would be easier to use for a non-technical user. I work for a small organization and have no back-up for Jitterbit if something happens to me. We don't have the technically savvy employees to understand 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.
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.
Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.
Evaluated Dell Boomi and Celigo as alternatives prior to purchasing Jitterbit. We went with Jitterbit at that time because we could handle all changes ourselves without any assistance from Jitterbit, and we liked their size and nimbleness. Dell Boomi was too big for us, and Celigo at that time did not have a self-service model. Every change had to go through them (although that has since changed). We were not in a position to be able to wait for someone to make changes for us given the rate of change within the business.
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.
The time it takes to connect systems has reduced by orders of magnitude. Previously, we would custom-develop connectors between various systems and they would all be managed by different vendors. With Jitterbit speed-to-deploy and the efficiency gained by managing all connections in one dashboard has been the greatest piece of the ROI.
