Fantastic Enterprise Reporting Platform
Updated March 30, 2025

Fantastic Enterprise Reporting Platform

David Shadbolt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Analysis Studio
  • Event Studio
  • Query Studio
  • Report Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics

Our team works across all industry verticals implementing IBM Cognos Analytics solutions for other companies.

Working with our clients, we design and implement Cognos into their organisation and build the solutions that help them gain more effective business insights. This includes building data models, reports and interactive dashboards to provide users with up-to-date information.

Pros

  • Advanced reporting
  • Scheduling and burst report distribution
  • Simplified development for end users with its drag and drop functionality
  • Delivery in multiple formats
  • Works across multiple databases and flexibility to join data

Cons

  • License costs. Far too expensive for the small to medium size businesses.
  • Visualizations. Lacking when compared to Power BI.
  • Stability and bugs. Whilst it's inventible there will be bugs, the fix lists for v11 series contain far too many issues that should really have been detected during their QA testing. This becomes a major issue for clients that have thousands of users and cannot constantly be applying fix pack after fix pack.
  • No completely free version for developers. IBM should follow Microsoft's approach with Power BI
  • Quicker report development time
  • Reduced costs with automated scheduling of reports
Allowing business users the ability to build their own reports reduces the burden on the developers within the IT department and demonstrates how Cognos provides a fantastic return on investment.
Security of the reports and platform is critical when rolling out any reporting solution. With Cognos seamlessly integrating with Active Directory and having Single Signon, security can be handled in one location and modified accordingly as part of the joiners, movers and leavers process.

Implementing row level security into the framework models provides confidence that when users are building their own reports, they are seeing the data that they're authorised to see.
The ability to build multi-page reports and render them in multiple formats has always been Cognos' major selling point. The flexibility offered when building reports, allows for the reports to customised based on the data and/or for users based on roles.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cognos Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cognos Analytics again?

Yes

Cognos is well suited for organisations that have a large user base and/or a significant number of reports. With it's web based design all the reports can be stored in a central location, allowing for a single version of the truth and secured as required. Another key feature is its advanced scheduling ability.

The license costs would rule out Cognos for smaller companies.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.7
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
9
7.5
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
5
Report sharing and collaboration
7
9.0
Publish to PDF
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
5.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
6
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
5
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
9.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
9
6.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
6.0
REST API
6
Javascript API
6

Using IBM Cognos Analytics

1000 - With over 3000 reports in the bank, we use IBM Cognos for a wide range of purposes. The bulk of the users are mostly using IBM Cognos for financial reporting and analytics along with treasury and liquidity management. Other departments such as HR use it for compliance reporting, compensation, etc.

The IT department use it for auditing purposes, such as report runs and active users.
8 - Our support desk people simply handle incidents. If the issue is simple such as rerunning a schedule they can do that. However anything more challenging like identifying why a report is showing unexpected data they need to hand over to our technical developers.

Our technical developers must have a range of skills to support the environment. All must be familiar with SQL, data modelling, have experience in report development and the ability to work with business users.

The most technical developers must have all of the above along with significant experience doing installations and upgrades.

  • Financial Reporting
  • Treasury Management
  • Asset Management
  • HR Analytics
  • Calendar report showing annual leave
  • Audit compliance
  • Bank Statement generation
  • Forecasting Server Maintenance
  • Real-Time Analytics
IBM Cognos is our primary reporting platform within the bank and is a critical system. With over a 1000 users and 3000 reports, Cognos will be used for many years to come.

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