IBM Cognos Analytics vs. RapidMiner vs. Upsolver

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

Incentivized

RapidMiner is really fantastic to perform fast ETL processes and work on your data as you want, no matter what is the source. You will really save a lot of time when you learn how to use it. You can create mining analysis with several algorithms, and thanks to add-ons, you can apply a lot of techniques. It will not replace a business intelligence dashboard but it allows to create great datamarts for your BI tools. One negative thing is that It's no easy to share your outputs.

Incentivized

• We can make dozens of dispatchers all focusing on different types of workloads.
• Friendly user interface, without the need for coding or complicated editing.
• Highly functionality reporting tools.
• We can easily create trigger when a certain threshold are met sending reports or alerts to needed parties.

Incentivized

• I am very impressed at how easily you can work within RapidMiner without much data analytics training. Plus with the help of the crowd, you can see what steps others have taken with their data analytics projects.
• Text mining was simple and clean. We used this for our call transcription problem where we didn't have the resources to listen to each call. We needed to qualify each call based on some key phrases.
• Our direct mail program was large and not very targeted. Using RapidMiner, we were able to isolate a predictive level we felt comfortable with and decided not to send to anyone below that level. We saved quite a bit of money.

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

• I hope RapidMiner would be the first data science platform that allows data scientists to change the behaviour of a machine learning algorithm that already exists in the repository. For example, I want to be able to change the way a genetic algorithm mutates.
• Automatic programming: One day, I hope RapidMiner can automatically generate codes in any 4th generation programming language based on the developed model.
• More tutorials/samples needed: Why doesn't RapidMiner becomes the next 'UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository'? Provide real examples and real cases for users to study and understand the best practices in modelling. RapidMiner already has some datasets for a tutorial. Besides the existing samples, I hope RapidMiner can provide more sample data and examples.

Incentivized

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.

Very fast and user-friendly tool

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.

Very use to use and learn

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

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.

Incentivized

We tried different data tools and we figured we give RapidMinder Studio a shot as one of our employees had experience with it, and when compared to some of the other tools that we used it was the best fit among the test group that we used. Overall it was a little more fluid and user-friendly.

Incentivized

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.

• We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios.
• Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis.
• Has mobile application which works seamless.
• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.

Incentivized

• Thanks to the patters that RapidMiner has detected, we have been able to follow clues in the right direction, both for the Protein Interaction Network Analysis and for the Epilepsy Research
• Students and participants of the machine learning workshops have learned about this technology and about the tool

Incentivized