IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson vs OneStream

IBM Cognos Analytics provides our organization with a workspace for data visualization and analysis, with a wide variety of customization options. It is well suited for exploring and discovering trends with the information provided in real time. It has the ability to create very attractive reports and dashboards. It offers robust controls for comprehensive data protection, generating reliability in the use of significant information

When as an organization you have more than one finance processes that need to be on some technology platform, OneStream is a great fit. Be it consolidation & reporting, planning & budgeting, account recs, tax provisioning, close management, transaction matching, etc. all these areas are handled well in OneStream. The benefits accrue from a single place to manage master data, data, security, and quick learning for users as different workstreams are rolled out.

• Pixel perfect reports. If a client can provide a pixel-perfect mockup, I can make the report indistinguishable from the mockup.
• Data security. It doesn't matter who the user is; when they log in and run a report, they will only see the data they are permitted to see.
• Performant reports on large data. Many tools have issues running on tables containing only a few million rows. Cognos can consistently run reports on multi-billion row tables without issue.
• Embedding reports in third-party tools. With Cognos Mashup Services, it is possible to build a report in IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson and call it programmatically. Need straight HTML? No problem. JSON? Atom? All good.

• Easy data integration with multiple data sources.
• Same user experience throughout the platform.
• The ability to add on to the platform is very good. The platform is designed so that a company can use it as a central source of information. The only limitation to creating new pieces of the platform by a developer is time.

• OLAP-cubes MUST IMMEDIATELY be upgraded to 64-bit-technology (if not, we are lost as Cognos/IBM-customer).
• Easier integration of complex authorisation systems (concepts) into cubes (vertical as well as horizontal authorisation).
• Much more statistics-functionality in cubes! (IBM bought SPSS 10 years ago!! where is the benefit of Cognos-users!!)!!!

• Dashboards are very useful to business users, but can be time consuming to build.
• Best practice documentation, the product is evolving and is relatively new (about 10 years old) so best practices are still be developed and communicated to the OneStream community.
• New product feature documentation and examples.

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.

Overall usability as an end-user is very easy. There are more people in the system getting information now than the prior platform used. People are gathering their information quicker as well. From an administrator standpoint, there are fewer glitches and issues than the prior platform. This is very good.

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.

OneStream is extremely responsive with support.

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 AI and the automation in IBM Cognos Analytics are pretty simple to use and almost provide accurate data. The report part compared to the Medidata Rave is always efficient and error-proof I got the reports nearly 90 percent. The analysis is pretty good I actually got the outcome that I wanted to produce.

OneStream is a much more powerful solution for us. Both products claim they can "do it all" but the OneStream XF Marketplace allows us limitless possibilities for what we can do - at a fraction of the implementation cost.

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 team that implemented this software tells me that the ROI is not obtained instantly; it must go through long months before obtaining good results.
• There are functions that are not easy for all users; this makes it difficult to obtain positive results in the first months.
• A year has to pass before noticing that after its configuration, we can work without delays.

• Customers have moved from multiple EPM systems as well as multiple EPM applications to OneStream.
• Their ROI has been quite high as lesser admins are required, no need to move data back & forth, no need for an additional dashboarding / BI tool, once a user is on OneStream can leverage it for more than 50+ use cases at no additional license cost.
• Automation, direct integration, scheduling, complex calculation capabilities, all help to further improve ROI and free up the time for the team to do value-adding tasks.
• Last but not the least is the confidence on the numbers is much higher.