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
Lattice Engines (discontinued)
Score 2.0 out of 10
N/A
D&B Lattice (formerly Lattice Engines) was a Predictive Lead Scoring solution that blended the contact profile and behavioral information from Marketing Automation systems with additional attributes that could contain hidden buying signals. The product has been discontinued.
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).
Lattice has been difficult to work with in the past few months. We've struggled internally to try and improve their models, but it hasn't proven itself to offer substantial value. We're able to suppress low quality leads, but Lattice also promotes some questionable leads at times and also grades high potential leads as low scoring. We've tried time and time again to improve the model, but they haven't offered much in terms of help or partnership.
Ease of use. It is a no brainer for our sales teams. They go through just 10 minutes of training. It is very prescriptive and clear. There is a minimal amount of flipping to get through what they need to. Everything is just on one screen.
Integration to Salesforce.com. The level of integration today is moderate. It integrates opportunity to opportunity. As soon as a sales person converts, it flows.
They are highly responsive as a vendor. If there’s a field that we want to add, they will adapt the product for us very quickly.
The model for professional services (fee based) is very flexible. It’s as much as you need. They advocate high service level for ramping new regions, and are very flexible with feet on the ground and helping out.
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.
Detailed technographic information - we had a lot of issues with Lattice not being able to identify specific technologies being used by a company, which would be able to provide us materially different context as a seller.
Model is built once and is static until refreshed - do not get meaningful feedback into the model in real-time
Hard to identify which attributes are meaningful enough to include as enrichment in SFDC.
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.
I will continue to use PRISM, especially now, because I after 3 years in the same geography, I have just transferred to a new territory. The tool really helps me focus on the best opportunities to pursue, which can sometimes be difficult with over 100 assigned accounts
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.
The product is part of a service. The team from Lattice did a great job of supporting us and of delivering the results we set out to attain. They became an integral part of our success.
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.
Please see my answers to the previous question. We had very good feedback from our product management, strategy and sales leadership and reps regarding our 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
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.
The implementation hit the milestones we established. Lattice was VERY committed to helping us make sure what we committed back to the organization was met.
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.
Lattice was an incumbent tool from several years ago. Early on, we enjoyed a good relationship with the team there. After the acquisition, we have definitely seen a decrease in the quality of support and engagement from the team. As a result, we will look at several competing vendors when our contract ends with Lattice.
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.
We have seen quantifiable ROI when our reps have used the product to target accounts. In a recent example we found that accounts that targeted these "hi-po" accounts identified by using Lattice analytics created over $27M in pipeline over a month long period for a key product we are interested in selling more of to customers, compared to a less than $1M for accounts that were not identified as "hi-po".
