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
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
The Oracle Analytics Cloud service is a public cloud service that provides a full set of capabilities to explore and perform collaborative analytics.
$16
per month per user
Pricing
IBM Cognos Analytics
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Standard
$10.60
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$42.40
per month per user
Professional - BYOL
$0.3226
OCPU per hour
Enterprise - BYOL
$0.3226
OCPU per hour
Oracle Analytics Server for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
$1.75
OCPU per hour
Professional
$16.00
per month per user
Enterprise
$80.00
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos Analytics
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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OCPUs represent physical CPU cores. Most CPU architectures, including x86, execute two threads per physical core, so 1 OCPU is the equivalent of 2 vCPUs for x86-based compute. The per-hour OCPU rate customers are billed at is therefore twice the vCPU price since they receive two vCPUs of compute power for each OCPU.
Oracle EPM Cloud seems to be the leader in this space. By my estimation, OACS is definitely leading the big 3 (IBM Cognos and SAP, being the other two) in terms of being progressive, features, dev tools for the end user, end user empowerment and plain old marketing.
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.
Oracle Data Visualization is very effective if used in an enterprise context with huge volumes of data coming from different systems. It supports dashboard and reporting capabilities and is easy to scale. It also allows you to leverage machine learning capabilities to extract hidden data trends. Visualization capabilities are powerful but not so various if compared to other solutions on the market. If you want to present a dashboard to an executive audience and you want to make your dashboards beautiful you must adapt them through PowerPoint.
Available without of the box connectors for Salesforce and oracle Saas Cloud. This is a huge plus for our business since we don't need another middleware solution just for this sake.
We are able to connect to our on-prem SQL Server database where we have our RMA database and other applications seamlessly without writing custom APIs.
OAC writes directly into ADW which is another advantage for loading Excel files into ADW after dataflow transformations.
OAC allows replication of the database from fusion ERP and lets us create subject areas using the data modeler.
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.
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.
Oracle Analytics Support team is very proactive and I have never had a situation where I had to wait for more than a day or two to get my issues resolved. This is a very big help for us and we appreciate Oracle and its team for guaranteeing that experience.
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.
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
Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (OBICS) does well in terms of handling data, creating joins, managing database relationships, and data integration from multiple sources. However, the visualisation features on Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (OBICS) are limited when compared to other business intelligence tools like Looker or Tableau. Again, the choice of tool depends on your specific requirements. Both provide different features and both are good at what they offer.
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.