IBM Cognos Analytics

Score7.4 out of 10

622 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.

Screenshot of AI-generated insights and forecasts that can be added with just a click of a button.

Screenshot of a dashboard that can be generated automatically using IBM Cognos Analytics by uploading or selecting data.

Screenshot of an AI-generated dashboard from a spreadsheet that was just uploaded. This offers a great starting point for the creative process.

Screenshot of where to import data to IBM Cognos Analytics from CSV files and spreadsheets. Users can connect to cloud or on-premises data sources, including SQL databases, Google BigQuery, Amazon, and Redshift.

Screenshot of Cognos Analytics Dashboard

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Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.

Report Versioning
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
Category average: 7.9
Report Delivery Scheduling
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
Category average: 8.2
Publish to Web
Category average: 8

Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Category average: 7.2
Mobile Application
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
Category average: 7.1
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Category average: 7.1

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

16.6%

1,804 installations of 10,892

“IBM Cognos Analytics has made it much easier for me to deal with huge amounts of data.”
— Founder & CEO, ENCYPHERS (11-50 employees)

#2 most frequent

Manufacturing

15.0%

1,637 installations of 10,892

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

12.0%

1,303 installations of 10,892

“I use IBM Cognos Analytics for its business intelligence (BI) functionality in complex reports preparation, data analysis, dashboard formulations, and monitoring business unit's sales performance over the period.”
— Senior Analyst, WTW (10,001+ employees)

Tony Higgins

System operations in Information Technology at DP Wagner (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It addresses problems related to data warehousers, help with poor decision making, and difficulties in identifying trends and other potential opportunities. We utilize the tool within our organization to better understand data, make informed decisions, and that advantage of other features like reporting, modeling, analysis, dashboards, and AI powered insights to better track trends.

Pros

We can make dozens of dispatchers all focusing on different types of workloads.
Friendly user interface, without the need for coding or complicated editing.
Highly functionality reporting tools.
We can easily create trigger when a certain threshold are met sending reports or alerts to needed parties.

Cons

Have to regularly checking official IBM channels or newsletters for updates and changes.
The availability to work in a sandbox environments or trial versions of IBM Cognos Analytics to practice.
Better for On-Prem vs cloud.
The pricing is higher than some of their competitors.

Return on Investment

The platform can be pretty pricey.
Convoluted contracts and they fine you for any breach during audits.
Things are changed between releases without any warning and break.
It is second to none at being able to customize list and crosstab type reports.
You can easily set up a report to be emailed out every day and even have it export the report to a shared folder.
On-prem environments can be scaled up pretty much as much as you would like.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI and Tableau Cloud

Other Software Used

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Desktop, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Nishant Thakkar View profile

Senior Analyst in Finance and Accounting at WTW (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use IBM Cognos Analytics for its business intelligence (BI) functionality in complex reports preparation, data analysis, dashboard formulations, and monitoring business unit's sales performance over the period. IBM Cognos Analytics, helped us in solving various problems ranging from manual reports creation leading lost of hours of turnaround and human error, dealing with data silos within various departments, delay in decision making. Bing business analyst, my scope of use case for Cognos centres around turning scattered data into actionable insights by creating sales insights reports, interactive dashboards for seniors consumption, and data exploration, validation, analysis and storytelling.

Pros

Enterprise reporting - Create, customise, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, etc.
Dashboard creation and data exploration & analysis - Using drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualisation. Additionally, using AI powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input (formation of pie, bar, line charts). It's useful for no-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheet data to get quick answers.
Building insights for accurate decision making - Package reports with data backed insights for stakeholders in pdf, and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting and strategic recommendations on relevant asks.

Cons

Limited real-time data connectivity - IBM Cognos Analytics relay on scheduled data refresh leading issues in real-time or streaming data access, especially for live sales data updates.
End point experience (Mobility) - Although it supports mobile but its experience can be improved as the app is not fully responsive or fluid like interactive filtering and dashboard creation are not user-friendly on small screen. It would be great if mobile UX is improved with better touch friendly controls and offline viewing options.
Limited data blending - There exist some struggle to blend or join data from different sources on the fly. If it had technical capabilities like Excel based data joining in dashboard or explorations without data module requiring creation upfront, would have been great for analysts.

Return on Investment

Report preparation - IBM Cognos Analytics reduced report formulation time by 60% specially for templated re-occurring reports like the monthly sales report
Improved decision making - The decision making speed has improved with Cognos's self service dashboards and AI driven data exploration
Automated distribution and uptime - Scheduled report delivery and bursting have eliminated various manual emailing and delays

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Jamie Brown View profile

VP Data Scientist in Information Technology at JPMorgan Chase (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics serves as a central platform for data analysis and visualization. It allows for me access and analyze data across different departments allowing me to interpret data sets and make informed business decisions.

Pros

access data across different platforms
create reports and dashboards
create visualization of data

Cons

allow for quicker learning curve for new users

Return on Investment

IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson delivers significant positive ROI
Significant Time Savings and Operational Efficiency

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop

Verified User

Program Manager in Product Management (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Cognos Analytics is a business intelligence and analytics platform to gather and aggregate data from multiple parts of our organization, then analyze and visualize data to make business decisions (mainly to improve B2B sales and customer satisfaction, but also as a hint for developing new products/solutions for our clients).

Pros

Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.

Cons

Steep learning curve for beginners. It takes time to understand what can be done and how.
The user interface feels old and not easy to use, especially compared to recent solutions.
Limited options for user identification (LDAP only).

Return on Investment

Helped improve the KPIs for sales/customer satisfaction.
Eliminated the need for manual reporting in several use cases.
However we needed quite some time to learn how to use BI functionalities.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Other Software Used

Slack, IBM watsonx Assistant, Microsoft Teams

Muneeb Khan

Business Intelligence Developer in Information Technology at American Iron & Metal (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics is used as a reporting tool to make reports and schedule them. We have over 250 reports that are scheduled daily and weekly to over 20 executives. IBM Cognos Analytics was initially decided to be used as an automatic scheduler of excel format reports. Later on it was adopted to be used as our dashboarding platform.

Pros

Schedule reports
Calculations and transformation of raw data
Flexibility with excel format

Cons

Write back functionality
Visual Data Modelling
Native connectivity with latest cloud platforms

Return on Investment

Time Savings & Productivity Gains
Consistent, governed data models reduce the risk of errors
Report bursting ensures store managers, regional leaders, and executives each receive tailored reports automatically
On-prem IBM Cognos Analytics environments require heavy IT effort to maintain servers

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Cloud and Sigma Computing

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Microsoft Power BI, Sigma Computing, ThoughtSpot

IBM Cognos Analytics

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

Categories & Use Cases

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