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
Yellowfin
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Yellowfin is a cloud-based business intelligence and dashboarding platform.
IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation
We can recommend this software without hesitation, as it has the ability to generate reports and data analysis, as well as process the data automatically, which saves time. It is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that wish to improve their services in the business world
Yellowfin’s Storyboard, Timeline and Collaborative tools make it easy to share data and insights across an organisation.
Strong Operational and Executive Dashboards that reflect the business KPIs and can send out prompts to people within the business based on rules.
Yellowfin makes it incredibly easy to create dynamic reports and dashboards which incorporate maps through locational intelligence functionality.
Yellowfin is a single license and all access is via a web browser making it perfect for both on-premise and cloud deployment. Mobile apps are also available.
User roles and source filtering allows Admin/IT to offer different functions/views by user group/role.
Mobile BI applications to support any device ..
API connectors ( YF 7.2 on the way in Mar16 ) for a range of third-party Web-based applications, data sources, Enterprises CRM/ERP apps & open data platform apps, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Twitter, Youtube , Zoho CRM, XE.com & more coming to make endusers to integrate their applications for better benefits
Yellowfin Integration with Predictive analytical and Big Data processing tools like R, UDF, Spark to build rich applications for end users
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.
The ability to predefine a colour for a specific graph as a selection option dynamically.
The ability to customise the label of a chart, especially with respect to performance related reporting graphs we need an increase in dynamic charting options to meet our more specialised requirements.
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.
As mentioned previously, if a newer company is looking for a strong, polished BI tool, Yellowfin would be a great software vendor to consider. Unfortunately, the high cost might be a barrier to these newer companies who dont have any legacy software/agreements such as an EA agreement with Microsoft.
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.
They have good support in what they provide. But what they provide is not what is promised. I would stay with them if I can. Be very careful before signing up with them. They are not what they seem in the sales pitches. Be very careful and make sure you test and test before you sign up.
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.
My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.
Yellow Fin platform is browser agnostic and is accessible from desktops as well as mobile devices. It is very simple and fast, it is integrated with Big Data, clients do not require a great training. It just works. But it’s easier to have things on the cloud, especially if you need to use different computers. Yellow Fin lacks the cloud feature.
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.
