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
Mediafly
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Mediafly Intelligence360, based on InsightSquared's solution acquired by Mediafly in 2021, is a sales analytics and development platform that also supports demand generation analytics and SaaS reporting. It is designed for providing insights into sales processes, closing rates, pipeline and revenue forecasts, calculating KPIs, and market hiring processes.
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
InsightSquared has been a great tool for quick reference dashboards for the whole organization and teams within the sales org. It presents a standardized individual dashboard for all the reps on the team. It doesn't fare well when trying to deep dive things like campaign and lead source inquiries, as well as activities associated with that opportunity.
The dashboard is amazing: easily customize your view so you can view all the data that is most relevant to you at a glance
Sales metrics: see how you are comparing to your peers, from every possible angle. InsightSquared gathers all the data you need to know, want to know, and didn't even know you wanted!
Predictive statistics and the likelihood of a deal to fail or succeed is quite useful in a sales environment where time efficiency is key. Need to know what deals to focus on? You can see exactly what deals need more TLC, which ones are likely to close, and which ones to stop wasting time on.
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.
I know this is something they have in process, but I would love to be able to customize reports myself. The support team is always super responsive and makes sure that we're taken care of. But, it would be great to just be able to log in and change the small things myself.
I recently downloaded the InsightSquared app to my phone, and I'd like to see more functionality there. Currently. You are only able to see dashboards that have a already been created.
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.
InsightSquared has been hugely beneficial to us, and to me in particular as someone outside of our sales team to gain insight into how our sales team and company is performing and how our overall health is. They offer fantastic customer support and have a great community to assist in your implementation of the product.
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.
InsightSquared is easy to use overall. Running reports and creating dashboards is quick and easy - drag and drop functionality. All reports have multi-filter options allowing you to drill down into your data. Scorecards for employees help show how quickly a rep can start selling after they join your team. Activity ratios provide insight into what it takes from a KPI standpoint to close a deal.
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.
InsightSquared has a very responsive team, and always willing to help with reporting needs which are not able to be completed in house. They do offer a professional services team at an additional cost, so if your reporting is very complex, or you have a team that is continuously changing the type of metrics they require as a business, their support team will be an invaluable asset for you.
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.
I was not involved in our purchasing of this platform, so comparing it is difficult. This being said, it's most similar to constantly running reports in Salesforce, probably. SFDC offers more flexibility, obviously, but InsightSquared offers better visualization, less report updating, and more features dedicated to making analytics more enjoyable. It's worth the cost of the platform to save your admin time 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.
