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
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
IBM Planning Analytics, powered by IBM TM1®, is an integrated planning solution designed to promote collaboration across the organization and help keep pace with the speed of modern business. With its calculation engine, this enterprise performance management solution is designed to help users move beyond the limits of spreadsheets, automating the planning process to drive faster, more accurate results. Use it to unify data sources into one single repository, enabling users to build…
They complete in each other in the analytics cycle. Not only can we get infused insight and descriptives and diagnotics from my data, I can actually plan when combining both software.
We have used Cognos in the past and found that although it is a powerful analytics tool it is not set up to support Higher education. We enjoy the ease of use and storyboarding analytics has to offer within a platform that is simple but yet complex to support our top priorities.
IBM Cognos Analytics is not a replacement for IBM Planning Analytics. IBM Cognos Analytics is focused only on reporting, but in that section it's an excellent addition to IBM Planning Analytics. You can directly use IBM Planning Analytics as a data source in IBM Cognos …
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).
I would be likely to recommend IBM Planning Analytics, particularly in scenarios where comprehensive financial and operational planning is essential. For instance, in our construction company, it is awesome for optimizing resource allocation across multiple projects, creating detailed project budgets, and conducting risk analysis to mitigate project uncertainties.
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.
IBM Planning Analytics was an upgrade from an older version of TM1 that is experiencing some growing pains, some functionality is harder to reach than it has been in the past
It is easy to learn as a surface user with created reports, but it does require some technical skills to make advanced calculations and reports if there is no reliable consultant available, much like Excel
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.
Since IBM Cognos Express is suitable only for medium data warehouse environment, we are not sure if this tool solves the long term need as the business keeps growing rapidly. So its a 50/50 ratio to renew Express license. But having said that, the components of IBM Cognos Express are also available in other Cognos BI suites like Cognos 10.x version. So we will probably upgrade our environment to IBM Cognos 10.x which comes with more new features.
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.
For developers, admins and end users looking for flexibility, IBM Planning Analytics would rate very highly on usability. For example, a developer has access to a highly performant built-in ETL (Extract Translate Load) tool and scripting language called Turbo Integrator that can (among other things) bring in data via flat file or direct connection from many data sources, move data around Planning Analytics, perform batch calculations, export to files or other data stores. In the rare situation where limitations are encountered there is a well documented REST API. Admins and end users benefit from the intuitive PAW (Workspace) interface as well as the rich Excel integration through Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE). Since flexibility inherently comes with a little more complexity, so an organization with simple and "cookie-cutter" requirements may rate Planning Analytics a little lower.
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.
Although I find the IBM Planning analytics documentation quite time consuming, their support with email and call is something i can term as very considerate and patient, I have had few calls about the features and how i would want to implement them within my projects, and the teams have been super helpful to resolve my issues
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.
Anaplan does not handle sparsity; this is very problematic for large volume data sets (many 0's). There also are limitations to the number of dimensions that can be used in a module. If more dimensions are required, then separate modules need to be built and intertwined. IBM PA does not have these limitations.
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.
