Review of Cognos BI
February 29, 2016

Review of Cognos BI

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.
In Cognos you can pull data from different sources like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, even Excel and present a consolidated view in a single report or dashboard.
IBM Cognos BI provides security control over both data and reports/dashboards you publish to users and consumers.
IBM Cognos BI is an enterprise level BI/reporting tool. it lacks the fancy visualizations which other tools are better at but at the same time those tools are not well suited for anenterprise reporting application. If any organization has a large volume of data analysis/reports then you have to consider maintenance costs and overhead. With IBM Cognos BI maintenance is easy as compared to other tools on large set of reports.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
10.0
Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
9.5
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
9
9.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
6
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
6.7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Predictive Analytics
6
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

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