Cognos falling behind
December 07, 2017

Cognos falling behind

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Query Studio
  • Report Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

IBM Cognos is used across the whole organization. It funnels down multiple databases to a standardize output and become report generating tool. It allows the editor with minimal sql coding skills to build reports across multiple sources. The downside is they do not provide cross packages report building, which we still ended up using additional tools to create the final reports. The additional tools I use, depending on the scale of the report, from basic Excel, Access, to Brio, SAS, SQL, to merge, integrate, clean data according to our need.
  • Users need minimal coding skills
  • Integrates multiple data sources
  • Standardizes data items
  • More Visual way to generate a report
  • Not user-friendly, it still functions as if from the 90s.
  • Too many odd bugs that users need to go around to avoid, especially now with the Cognos Analytic 10.
  • Cognos does not allow cross packages data sourcing, which is a huge problem.
  • The system functions like an old machine with a new wrapping.
  • Tableau, Excel, Access, SQL and SAS
Tableau is amazing, user friend, innovative, straightforward in concept. Cognos does not stacks up against another software, it is more due to the insufficiency of this software that we need to accommodate with many others. Such as Excel, Access, SQL, SAS, Tableau. The load Cognos is taking in my position is becoming less and less.
Compared to Tableau, Cognos is completely beaten up in data sources, merging, real time. We use Cognos because we have had it for so long, so we have to keep it, but if Tableau makes progress in the data cleaning and sourcing part, it can easily take over Cognos.
We have folders that we can use from each other's file, so we don't need to rebuild queries. Access control seems to work fine since this mainly controlled by the central IT. Sharing data still remain at the level of export excel to user, no visualization that can directly share upon to others. Report distribution and formatting is pretty old school, nothing exciting, not much to expect.
IBM Cognos is an Enterprise software that large entities like more for the legal perspective of the spectrum, since security and legal are always a major concern for large entities. But for smaller entities, there are so many better tools that can do the job with a fraction of the cost. With the same mindset of the security and legal, Cognos upgrades are still very clunky, nothing exciting or with major improvements. In so many ways, Tableau will be taking over the data world at some point.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
3
Formatting capabilities
2
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
1
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
2
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated