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
Magento BI
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Magento BI (formerly RJMetrics) is an ecommerce analytics solution that provides data pipeline, warehouse and visualization capabilities. It was acquired by Magento, and is now owned and supported by Adobe.
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).
A company or organization that is in contact with the customer and wants to examine customer behavior in the purchase and selection of products and services should use this platform. It does not matter how many advertising tools and referral links or social media campaigns you use to attract customers. In any case, Magento BI integrates all the information and DB as a single platform and provides you with the best reports. Potential customers can be positioned according to location, city, country. Now we know exactly which product is most popular and where to put our advertising costs on which site or social network has the most audience.
It is relatively easy to manipulate the time period in which you want to see your report. This is important for our business because we are constantly analyzing sales month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. RJ makes it easy to toggle between these time ranges on the same report.
The visualizers available for reports are what you would expect out of a product like this. You have the ability to view your results in tables and a multitude of charts.
The ability to customize dashboards and rearrange reports quickly is great and intuitive!
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.
Educational videos and tutorials must be more simpler and more understandable language with subtitles
There should be the ability to select graphic diagrams with different shapes and graphs
The basic features of the Essential Paln can be increased with the current price so that startup companies can better use the features of this platform.
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.
In addition to its features, it has made the Magento Commerce platform much better, more functional, and smarter, and through Magento BI dashboard they know very well what reports have been sent and all our business tools are summarized in one business platform. The ability to share report results is very popular and useful, and you can share content with anyone anywhere in the world.
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.
The very strong and knowledgeable support team and great help forums and documents, any questions and cases will be answered immediately or checked through tickets and resolved quickly. It is also possible to send comments and changes. Or our team , fast response and after-sales cooperation of the service company is always more than the product itself and its quality, and we want the service and support to support our interests.
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.
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 advantage of Magento BI is easier compatibility and adaptation with Adobe platforms and easier installation, configuration and customization with Mojto Store Builder and its various caskets, and I am very satisfied with it now and in every way I think it is a very good platform for integration in reporting.
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.
