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 CRM On Demand
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
The basis of this offering is the Market2Lead product that Oracle acquired in 2010. It has now been fully integrated with Oracle's On Demand CRM product and is a full-featured marketing automation product with features from lead management and nurturing, to measuring marketing ROI.
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).
Oracle CRM is reliable and it fits well in a scenario where a company aims to grow their customer base and improve their relationship with their clients and ensure that all customer services are offered in an efficient manner. Oracle CRM is accessible from any device and this ensures easy usage of the platform and assure all staff to execute their various business processes.
Several of our members were not familiar with various IT functions within CRM prior to working with it and so they were able to develop a working knowledge of IT pretty quickly afterwards.
It has a familiar feel to it as it allows users to work the data into a spreadsheet type layout with pivot tables and graphs and so it is quick to adopt.
Customization is great with a working knowledge of HTML, which isn't too hard to learn. You can really adapt CRM to any needs stylistically or content wise.
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.
The ability to schedule and push out reports is missing from this system. If we want to mass deliver a report on a schedule, we must run it, export it and email it out to the group, or purchase a 3rd party system.
The ability to trigger workflow events on a schedule is missing this system. Currently, there has to be a trigger initiated by a user and we have situations where we'd like to be able to schedule a work flow routine to go out and check from specific situations and then trigger an action. We'd also like to be able to trigger workflow actions on one object based on something in another object and this capability is very limited.
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.
Compared to other competitors I find it very easy to use and learn .It has been helpful in our organisation and we have been able to manage our projects and operations well without interference.
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.
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.
MS Dynamics was easy to integrate to MS Power BI. This BI and reporting aspect is a clear strong point for Microsoft. MS solutions seem easier to integrate and learn, but this depends on the IT landscape and the complexity of integrations in a respective company.
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.
This software can display in real-time when an order is submitted, received, fulfilled, and shipped out. We are able to know within the week of what new orders came in and how effective we are being from targeting specific regions of the nation.
