Powerful and reliable BI tool
March 20, 2024

Powerful and reliable BI tool

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Query Studio
  • Report Studio
  • Analysis Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics

We use IBM Cognos Analytics as our primary Business Intelligence tool for our risk and business reporting needs. We use it to produce customized reports for specific user/entitlement groups.
We also use it for Data exploration/cleansing efforts in initial stages of our Machine Learning projects and to run statistical analytics on various data sets.
  • AI assistant is handy and speeds up intial setup
  • Data exploration and discovery
  • Excel charting
  • Integrates with wide range of data sources
  • Clunky UI
  • Not as widely used as Qlik & Tableau and hence lacks community
  • Lots of minor bugs
  • Needs initial training as its not as intuitive.
  • Support is lacking compared to competitors
  • Saved time preparing management reports and insights by over 50%
  • More accurate machine learning models as we use it for data exploration
  • Complaint within our regulatory framework as we need to have strict data controls
They've helped our middle office and back office non technical users to be able to probe data and come up with informed analysis on past trades. This has dramatically reduced the number of support requests for ad-hoc reporting raised with our technical teams. The reporting tool has helped compliance and regulatory teams to analyze trade data on T+1 basis instead of waiting for weeks and helped improve our internal controls
In a bank, these controls are critical as we need row and column level data protection. In addition, we need to prove to compliance on a regular basis that our controls are working correctly and this tool helps us provide the data in accordance with user permissions.
This works great, in more complex reports it gets trickier to get the formula correct.
IBM Cognos Analytics is a relatively late entrant in the BI space - dominated by Tableau and Qlik. it works well for 80% of our use cases and is easy for a non technical user to start using. Also due to enterprise licensing, its easier to distribute internally.

Do you think IBM Cognos Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cognos Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Cognos Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM Cognos Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cognos Analytics again?

Yes

IBM Cognos Analytics is well suited for use cases where you have to present reporting and tell story using data to a non-technical audience. The charting features are good and helps combine and analyze various datasets easily.

It's less suited for use by Machine Learning engineers/developers to probe data and derive statistical insights from datasets.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
6
Report sharing and collaboration
7
Publish to PDF
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
6
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Predictive Analytics
7
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
7
Multi-User Support (named login)
5
Role-Based Security Model
5
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
6
Report-Level Access Control
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
6
Responsive Design for Web Access
7
Mobile Application
5
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
REST API
7
Javascript API
6