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
Terminus ABM Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Supporting B2B strategies, the Terminus platform offers tactical playbooks that help teams meet accounts throughout their entire lifecycle. It is a platform rooted in first-party data that surrounds buyers with engaging digital experiences from account acquisition to expansion and renewal. The Terminus engine is built to drive ROI, minimize fraud, prioritize brand safety, and turn intent into relevant, actionable insight for GTM teams. Key benefits of Terminus: - Relevant…
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
Terminus ABM Platform is well suited for organizations beginning their ABM journey. It is easy to implement and there is a great team to help you do so. Ongoing customer success teams ensure you are taking full advantage of the platform and work to help you develop an ABM strategy that fits your business needs.
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.
Support times are iffy. We've had slower replies and resolutions to issues since they acquired Sigstr and now support both products.
Display advertising generally has low ROI, in part due to "banner blindness". If you're not continuously developing engaging creatives, you're going to see very little return with this platform.
Their UI needs serious work. Some options are locked after you move to the next screen in their campaign wizard (nothing should ever be locked in draft) and unless they've recently changed it, you can't delete dead draft campaigns - just archive them.
There are a few serious discrepancies in the analytics when it comes to identifying which end companies have people who have viewed your ads (i.e. Microsoft has huge numbers because Azure is their product).
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.
Terminus is a turn-key partner in the B2B Account-Based Marketing space. Their model is flexible and efficient which in turn provides effective results. Their sales staff is great and never tries to up-sell, but rather coach and educate our teams to be better at our jobs. It has been great to collaborate
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.
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.
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.
Drift has banners available in their email tool, furthermore, we are able to mimic a Sigstr banner in HubSpot when we build emails by placing the banner image with a link in the bottom of an email, it's just a more manual process. I can't recommend any other solution over Sigstr, they own what they do and don't try to reach in their product marketing and I respect their product for that.
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.
