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.
$11.25
per month per user
ZoomInfo Operations
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
ZoomInfo OperationsOS/RingLead is a comprehensive data quality management platform for sales and marketing operations teams to clean, enrich, and route their go-to-market data.
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
We used to suffer with the leakage of leads and with duplicate entries, just like how I mentioned earlier. After implementing it, our data hygiene has improved by a huge quantity. Our team has become more efficient in terms of reaching out to the prospect within minutes of showing interest in our SAAS security products and services, instead of spending time on data entry in the Excel sheets and then working on the lead. It has reduced our manual research time by almost 36 %, allowing the team to focus on revenue generation rather than Sales operations.
EverString allows us to build account lists based off in-depth firmographic or technographic data. It's far more accurate than trying to build these lists any other way.
EverString is fast. Where it might've previously taken us weeks to build lists of this quality, we now can build them in a matter of minutes (and have them ready to be published in a couple of hours).
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.
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.
I give this rating because I feel that ZoomInfo Operations has made our work easier and smoother than before. Like now we manage our sales leads, new engagements, easily, and the data we get from ZoomInfo Operations helps us a lot to move in the right direction. our customer success rate is higher than before after implementing it.
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 easy to use - there are only a couple of areas that I need to think through how best to build specific rules or logic to ensure updates are made as expected. The ability to easily add filters and immediately see how many records match them creates a use case in itself. Sometimes we pull up Ringlead just to gain quicker access to counts of records that meet specific criteria, because it is faster than building views or reports in Salesforce. It is also extremely easy to see what records were updated, imported, or merged - the reporting and access to the history of activities are very helpful.
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
I have been using ZoomInfo on and off since 2018, and I have NEVER had the site go down on me once. I'm not sure how they do it, I'm not a software engineer, but they have 100% up time compared to other software as a service. Our CRM has already gone down a couple times this year, but not ZoomInfo.
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.
I would rate its performance 9. I do not doubt its performance, the pages load quickly withour laging or error. It gives a report within the time frame without errors, no matter how complex the report is. We integrated it with our CRM; at first, it tended to slow a little, but later it was fixed and ran smoothly.
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.
I give this rating because I never feel they deserve less than it. Their commitment towards the customer is outstanding, whenever I need to reach out to the supprot, I feel like I am just talking to a person who is sitting beside me. They respond quickly and solve the problems easily, even guiding us on how not to get into the same problem again and again, so we can avoid going back to 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.
Have a plan on how you're going to evaluate. We had a two-month trial period, but a six-month average lead cycle time, making it impossible to evaluate on a purely new-business ROI basis within the trial. We applied the model to our prior data, which demonstrated how much time and effort was devoted to accounts that weren't going to close
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.
We had looked at a few other tools alongside ZoomInfo Operations, including Clearbit and Apollo. Of course, they all had their strengths and their weaknesses. But ZoomInfo Operations really stood out for the accuracy as well as the depth of its data. Also, the Salesforce integration and the EverString capabilities were important
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.
It can be scalable, and I've seen it at organizations that made it scalable, and organizations that did not. It really depends how well it integrates with your CRM (does great with Salesforce, for example). If a company doesn't take it serious, it will never scale unless you have decision makers and C-Suite pushing for it.
Generate more pipeline - indirectly. Data from anywhere still needs to be transformed and used for a business objective.
Saved time in doing research and data population.
Assuming a business will purchase a data vendor, the comparison between other vendors is a factor of cost, functionality, and data quality. ZoomInfo has higher costs typically - which would lower the ROI - but with proper incentives or discounts, the comparative ROI grows.
