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
Talend Data Integration
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
The Talend Integration Suite, from Talend, is a set of tools for data integration.
There are code building and code conversions internally in most of these ETL tools. The repository is an overhead in the ETL process. There may be a need for a full-time administrator to manage deployments and monitor jobs. With Talend, it seems to be transparent with the pure …
With the help of IBM Cognos, the sales division can analyze sales performance, sales trends in top-performing areas, etc. It also helps in financial planning, like forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis. It also helps increase supply chain performance by analyzing it. It should be easy to use for small-scale data analysis. MS Excel is very useful for small-scale data analysis.
The same way you design data integration job can be used to design services. It is easy to enhance by custom components and can adapt to all requirements. Talend Data Integration connects to [a] multitude of data sources and streaming service. Very easy interface to design complex applications without spending much time on coding. Easy to learn and master. Talend constantly strives to better itself by adding more features and functionalities.
We used Talend to ETLing the data from myriad sources such Oracle Database, Clarify, Salesforce, Sugar CRM, SQL DB, MQ, Stibo Step, FTP, Netezza, and Files.
We leverage Talend transformation capabilities for stitching the data , unions and join
We successfully created the final unified set that can be used by business
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.
We use Talend Data Integration day in and day out. It is the best and easiest tool to jump on to and use. We can build a basic integration super-fast. We could build basic integrations as fast as within the hour. It is also easy to build transformations and use Java to perform some operations.
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.
Good support, specially when it relates to PROD environment. The support team has access to the product development team. Things are internally escalated to development team if there is a bug encountered. This helps the customer to get quick fix or patch designed for problem exceptions. I have also seen support showing their willingness to help develop custom connector for a newly available cloud based big data solution
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.
Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization options for reporting and dashboards. Cognos can smoothly integrate with IBM products and other third party data sources whereas Sigma Computing provides integration with cloud data warehouses and data lakes
In comparison with the other ETLs I used, Talend is more flexible than Data Services (where you cannot create complex commands). It is similar to Datastage speaking about commands and interfaces. It is more user-friendly than ODI, which has a metadata point of view on its own, while Talend is more classic. It has both on-prem and cloud approaches, while Matillion is only cloud-based.
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’s only been a positive RoI with Talend given we’ve interfaced large datasets between critical on-Prem and cloud-native apps to efficiently run our business operations.
