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
SAP Conversational AI (discontinued)
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
SAP Conversational AI was a platform used to build chatbots and digital assistants in SAP integration. Starting January 2023, SAP Conversational AI, SAP’s chatbot building platform has been set to maintenance mode. Existing customers can continue to use the enterprise edition of the product until the end of their contract.
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).
It would be most suitable to help you attain swift conversation flows as you engage with your audiences. The bots are also of indispensable value in handling repetitive tasks around the firm such as automated HR resourcing expeditions or marketing campaigns or any other important but monotonous tasks. I however admit that analyzing the bot's performance is quite complex, have an RPA specialist around.
SAP has helped me manage my teams cost in material management.
SAP Conversational AI has provided with the goal of developing bot analytics to respond to common user face issues when reporting troubleshooting issues with software equipment as well as technical equipment.
Has helped deploy new bots to increase response time to employees who require assistance with ordering equipment software as well as application development in software ordering.
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.
SAP can certainly provide better and more clear documentation on how to customize and deploy the chatbot/use SAP Conversational AI.
There is lot less developer community around SAP Conversational AI so it is hard to get help from outside developers and experts on best practices, hacks and existing applications/integrations.
It is hard to use SAP Conversational AI outside SAP S/4HANA Cloud, for example on AWS or GCP or in a multi cloud environment.
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.
Chatbots have already acquired most of the market and are still trending with the needs of changing market everyday. It will keep evolving with AI and NLP more to offer for improvements. SAP CAI is a good product to add to an enterprise using SAP ERP Suite
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
Never had an issue. SAP CAI shares the same platform as any other product hosted on SAP Cloud Platform (aka BTP) and depends on your hosting (US, Europe, Asia). Maintenance modes are planned and customers are aware of it well in advance in order to mitigate potential impacts on the service offering.
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.
It's a pure SaaS platform hosted on SAP Cloud Platform (aka BTP). The experience is pretty much seamless with minimum loadings or noticeable lags. The hosting depends on your location so you may want to make sure the instance is available on a server close to you, such as the USA, Europe or Asia.
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.
Great support from the people of SAP Conversational AI as of the community. Sometimes it takes a little while for folks of the SAP Conversational AI team to answer but this has mostly to do with the overload of questions and users the product has. The gold-support channel within Slack that SAP Conversational AI has, is a great help to distinguish more professional usage and therefore more urgent questions.
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.
The platforms have similarities in terms of making the organization more data-driven. However, the use cases are different. SAP Analytics Cloud is used for reporting, deploying dashboards, and scheduling timely delivery of reporting and analytics. SAP Conversational AI is a more front-end product that end users can directly use to navigate the web application better. Both have strengths in their respective areas. Conversational AI is more recent and cutting edge.
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 impact has been very positive for our business objectives. Through the chatbot, our clients can have an immediate response to any of their requests without the need of an intervention of a person or without the use of the telephone or email. Customer satisfaction has been much higher.
