Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cognos to send PDF, Excel, HTML reports to individuals emails or have users run their reports manually that they would like to have exported as a PDF, Excel, or HTML format. We also utilize Cognos bursting to send individuals their appropriate reports without having to make several reports based on a burst key. We use Cognos to help provide insight into historical data for uses throughout business areas of the company.

Pros and Cons

List/Table Reporting. It is awesome at providing detailed table lists of rows and provides it in multiple pages of a PDF based on the size of the table being exported.
Bursting to the appropriate individuals what they want to see/ have privileges to see.
Being able to email reports, whether that is HTML, PDF, or Excel formats.

With the upgrade from Cognos 10 to Cognos 11, there were a lot of features, like run schedule once, weren't brought over to the newest version of Report Studio.
I felt like they were trying to chase Tableau and Qlik with dashboarding rather than focusing on their bread and butter of Report Studio or which other Business Intelligence tools don't do very well.

Alternatives Considered

IBM has tried to push its product to be like Tableau and included dashboarding, but we still use Tableau due to better features.

I haven't found anything that compares to the amazing features we get to use with IBM Cognos Report Studio, which allows you to send emails (PDF, Excel, HTML attachments).

Data Integration

A majority of IBM Cognos customers use frameworks, which are painful to maintain over time. We use SQL queries to our EDW. We have admins to add the appropriate database connections so we can use custom SQL in our reports. It would be awesome if Cognos built more cool features around custom SQL queries like Tableau.

Collaboration and Sharing

It's possible for our organization to share data across teams, but due to being a healthcare organization we have to make sure it goes to the appropriate individuals. We built a custom website program that allows business owners of different data sources throughout the company determine which members should be in what groups so that reports go to the appropriate individuals. With this custom web app and IBM Cognos, it is fantastic to share data across the organization in PDF, Excel, or HTML formats. I just wish they did a better job at managing groups or updating their Cognos SDK, without charging additional fees for custom development.

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, ThoughtSpot

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for

Emailing reports to customers and providing them with their appropriate data.
Providing reports as a PDF, HTML, Excel.
Able to connect to an Oracle Database to create reports.

Overall, we use IBM Cognos for reporting needs, which other tools don't do very well.

We don't use IBM Cognos for creating dashboards, we use Tableau instead. We don't use IBM Cognos for searching dimensional models, we use ThoughtSpot instead.

I wish IBM Cognos didn't cost so much.

IBM Cognos Report Studio works great for distributing data

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos