Review of Cognos BI
Modules Used
- Analysis Studio
- Event Studio
- Query Studio
- Report Studio
- Framework Manager
- Dynamic Cubes
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos
We sell IBM Cognos BI to our customers, it's used for analysis, reporting, dashboards, and scorecards, etc.
- It's very easy to implement Cognos BI in an organization, easy to learn and maintain the system.
- Framework Manager packages provide central metadata management of underlying database or data warehouse to be used in reports. Unlike SSRS or other reporting tools where updating a single column in 1000 reports means 1000 manual changes, in Cognos you just update the framework model and it's done.
- Cognos Workspace is amazing at giving consumer level users the power to manage the presentation of a dashboard from colors to layout format to what data they want to see. They have the power and capability to customize any dashboard to their needs.
- Ad hoc Analysis capability of Cognos for enterprise level application is very easy to use, user friendly, and easy to maintain. Power users can get help from professional developers where needed and still can go back to using the ad hoc studio without any issues. This means the ad hoc analysis tools give you the power of professional reporting/analysis tools when needed and still be simple in interface and easy to use.
- Charting and visualization in Cognos 10 version was not best of the best available. But with the new release of Cognos Analytics (Cognos 11) IBM have improved it quite a bit.
- Map Analysis/Reporting and geospatial capabilities needs to be improved.
MS BI: A lot of times we meet customers who are dealing with an MS BI maintenance nightmare and we try to ease their pain by implementing Cognos BI and their reporting and analysis system. Cognos BI is better than MS BI from ease of implementation to production support and maintenance. The only advantage of MS BI is I think it's little cheaper to begin with but at the end your maintenance overhead and time to implement a change is longer and larger.
Tableau: has a better/fancy visualization but it lacks a lot of enterprise level capabilities which Cognos BI comes with and supports extremely well.
Tableau: has a better/fancy visualization but it lacks a lot of enterprise level capabilities which Cognos BI comes with and supports extremely well.