IBM Cognos Analytics vs. Oracle APEX

IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation

Incentivized

Based on our organization's experience, Oracle APEX is a versatile and powerful tool, but its suitability depends on specific business needs, technical requirements, and the nature of the application being developed. Scenarios where Oracle APEX fits well: Business Process Automation/Workflows Reporting and Dashboards for Data Analytics AI based systems such as Select AI Chatbots for data insights based on LLMs Native-like Mobile Applications using PWA feature of APEX Scenarios where Oracle APEX may be less appropriate: Very Complex and highly interactive applications Use cases based on a non-oracle Database

• Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
• Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
• Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.

Incentivized

• Easy upgrade path from Forms, allowing reuse of code and a low learning curve for Forms developers.
• Very quick to develop in. Ideal for prototyping or iterative development which is how we usually work.
• Comes with cross browser and mobile compatibility out of the box.
• Easy to incorporate other web technologies.
• Development environment runs straight from a browser. This has proved to be a life saver when issues crop up on a weekend.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Perhaps is our problem, since we haven’t explored it deeply, but I think that a better portability to mobile devices would help the adoption of APEX.
• Applications weren’t as light as we thought, and we had to move the APEX server to the same data center where our data base was running, due to performance issues. When we started, we supposed that that situation would not be an issue.
• At least in Argentina and Brazil, you can not find as many programmers with experience in APEX as you can find with other technologies.

Incentivized

It took my BI team one year to become productive at developing useful content on the IBM Cognos platform. After this year, the reports being developed for a client were stale and no longer relative to the ever changing needs of the business client. Given the same opportunity, I would select a platform that allows the team to quickly produce BI content. Fail fast and recover quickly!

I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.

Incentivized

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.

Oracle APEX has delivered a strong positive ROI by significantly reducing development time, lowering costs, and improving operational efficiency through automation and real-time reporting. While there are some limitations around frontend flexibility and DevOps, the overall business value—especially in data-driven enterprise applications—has been substantial.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.

Incentivized

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

The implementation was handled very well. The initial implementation exposed a lot of disagreement between our campuses and departments as to how we define data. This was not entirely unexpected, but I thought that we did a nice job as a team to work through some of these challenges.

Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Incentivized

IBM Cognos Analytics is robust in terms of reporting, governance and scheduling while Power BI excels in use, interactivity and visuals. In nutshell, IBM Cognos Analytics has edge over Power BI for enterprise grade , structured reporting needs.

Incentivized

Our company was preparing a comparison of Oracle APEX against other low-code technologies. The focus was primarily on Mendix and Microsoft Power Apps. As with any technology, each platform has its pros and cons. I would choose Oracle APEX because clients often already have an Oracle database, but they don't always realize they can use it with Oracle APEX. This easily accessible platform is a great web-based interpretation of the database.

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 platform can be pretty pricey.
• Convoluted contracts and they fine you for any breach during audits.
• Things are changed between releases without any warning and break.
• It is second to none at being able to customize list and crosstab type reports.
• You can easily set up a report to be emailed out every day and even have it export the report to a shared folder.
• On-prem environments can be scaled up pretty much as much as you would like.

Incentivized

• There have been numerous cases where solution development using Oracle's "RAD Stack" (ORDS, RDBMS & APEX) has saved many ten's of thousands of dollars in cost that would have otherwise been incurred by following vendor recommendation and/or other alternatives.
• Impact on overall business objectives has been completely positive: low cost of maintenance, seamless easy upgrades, reduced development time

Incentivized