Likelihood to Recommend 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).
Read full review TV is well suited for high speed, which is a great for large tables. The workload functionality is very good when in Viewpoint. The BAR functionality could use a little work. QueryGrid is very useful as well. The client handlers are still a work in progress, as I keep hearing that they continue to fail. There are also many restarts on the systems as well.
Read full review Pros We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios. Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis. Has mobile application which works seamless. Read full review ETL (Extract - Transfor - Load) NOS to send data from Teradata Vantage to S3 and from S3 to Teradata Vantage Teradata GeoSpacial feature Bulk reading and writing in huge tables MPP capacity already mature Temporal Capacity more mature that other solutions TASM Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Teradata is an excellent option but only for a massive amount of data warehousing or analysis. If your data is not that big then it could be a misfit for your company and cost you a lot. The cost associated is quite extensive as compared to some other alternative RDBMS systems available in the market. Migration of data from Teradata to some other RDBMS systems is quite painful as the transition is not that smooth and you need to follow many steps and even if one of them fails. You need to start from the beginning almost. Last but not least the UI is pretty outdated and needs a revamp. Though it is simple, it needs to be presented in a much better way and more advanced options need to bee presented on the front page itself. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Teradata is a mature RDBMS system that expands its functionality towards the current cloud capabilities like object storage and flexible compute scale.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review It has helped our project to save time, effort and give accurate results in the quickest possible time. The diagnostics feature is also outstanding giving us a detailed report of the error which occurred, when it occurred and the likely cause and resolution of the same as well. The support of SQL is inherited which makes it easy to work on it because you don't need to learn any new language for this.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We have meetings at the beginning with the technical team to explain our requirements to them and they were really putting in a lot of effort to come up with a solution which will address all our needs. They implemented the software and also trained a few of our resources on the same too. We can get in touch with them now as well whenever we run into a roadblock but it's very less now.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Teradata is way ahead of its competitor because of its unique features of ensuring data privacy and data never gets corrupted even in worst case scenario. In most cases, the data corruption is a major issue if left unused and it leads to important data being wiped off which in ideal case should be stored for 3 years
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment High ROI with well designed solutions. Supported by scalable deployment, robust security model and ability to create valuable content. High ROI where well designed data models can be deployed with a common metadata layer to a variety of users and use cases. High ROI in an environment that includes a variety of vendors and best of breed products within the overall platform Read full review Saving time and cost through its stable integration tools which helps import and export a huge amount of different data. Providing analytics for the different data is easy and quick. Securing all the data processes across the entire company. Great Cloud solution for effective data quality management. Read full review ScreenShots Teradata Vantage Screenshots