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IBM Cognos is a mid tier BI solution best suited with great customer service and support
September 12, 2014

IBM Cognos is a mid tier BI solution best suited with great customer service and support

Francisco Prieto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

10.2 - present

Modules Used

  • Analysis Studio
  • Query Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

Cognos is used throughout the organization but under different capacities and for different reasons. There are three tiers: Developers, PowerUsers/Analyst and end users.

Cognos is used to deliver historical reporting through queried data tables and programmable reporting functions. It allows us to get a pulse on how the business is doing and deliver production informatics to our sales and marketing groups.
  • Cognos provides a simple way to view and use dynamic tables to slice and dice data similar to what a pivot table does. Once particular reports or queries have been set, they are easily married with email and pdf functionality allowing us to schedule reporting data deliveries.
  • Cognos doesn't do well when competing with other tools that allow for data mining, digital analytics and also predictive analytics. Its difficult to produce forecasting type dashboards that are dynamic to the end user. Too often you are limited to static views which are not dynamic.
IBM Cognos is a big, all-embracing BI solution mainly to satisfy general needs of many large organizations. It has good scalability. There are however easier to use and more intuitive solutions depending on your need. IBM Cognos is also more costly pound per pound than the competition.
We are heavily tied to IBM with other portions of the business so don't foresee us breaking off completely from their offering, however a better statement would be to say that we will be scaling back some of the functionality we pay for today.
There are about 200 users in our Division.
I'm neutral here as there are not many limitations we have experienced when connecting to databases.
The product is easily used through email and lists distribution.
This is one aspect where the tool lacks that special something when compared to more dynamic options. The visual attractiveness is on par with that of Excel 2002.
IBM Cognos is scoped specifically for the traditional reporting and analysis tasks using a variety of presentation techniques. These include simple graphs, charts, reports, and tables. For orgs that haven't implemented an organization wide solution, Cognos would be a prime candidate. Probably the strongest feature is the ability to offer a mid tier enterprise wide BI environment solution.