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
Informatica Cloud Data Quality
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
The vendor states that Informatica Data Quality empowers companies to take a holistic approach to managing data quality across the entire organization, and that with Informatica Data Quality, users are able to ensure the success of data-driven digital transformation initiatives and projects across users, types, and scale, while also automating mission-critical tasks.
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).
Helps to increase productivity, optimize costs, and democratize data across multiple cloud environments with cloud ETL and ELT. Capacity to integrate data sources at scale and with ease. Has cloud data integration capabilities that cover diverse sets of patterns, use cases, and users ensuring we have well-architected and seamless automated data pipelines.
The matching algorithms in IDQ are very powerful if you understand the different types that they offer (e.g., Hamming Distance, Jaro, Bigram, etc..). We had to play around with it to see which best suit our own needs of identifying and eliminating duplicate customers. Setting up the whole process (e.g., creating the KeyGenerator Transformation, setting up the matching threshold, etc..) can be somewhat time consuming and a challenge if you don't first standardize your data.
The integration with PowerCenter is great if you have both. You can either import your mappings directly to PowerCenter or to an XML file. The only downside is that some of the transformations are unique to IDQ, so you are not really able to edit them once in PowerCenter.
The standardizer transformation was key in helping us standardize our customer data (e.g., names, addresses, etc..). It was helpful due to having create a reference table containing the standardized value and the associated unstandardized values. What was great was that if you used Informatica Analyst, a business analyst could login and correct any of the values.
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.
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.
As pointed out earlier, due all the robust features IDQ has, our use f the product is successful and stable. IDQ is being used in multiple sources (from CRM application and in batch mode). As this is an iterative process, we are looking to improve our system efficiency using IDQ.
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.
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.
Informatica Data Quality has a wide range of cleansing features, that are detailed, professional, and accurate in scaling down the required database. Further, Informatica Data Quality ensures there is proper collaboration, and this fosters businesses to have the freedom of working closely with several programs. Finally, Informatica Data Quality design is authentic and allows personalization.
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.
