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Meghdeep
Updated March 16, 2015

Meghdeep

Meghdeep Raval, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Event Studio
  • Query Studio
  • Report Studio
  • Business Insight Advanced

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

  • Framework Manager (metadata modeling tool) is a pretty flexible tool for any complex data modeling.
  • With use of Report Studio you can handle any business logic for reporting.
  • Event studio is used for event based scheduling.
  • Business Insight advanced is used for ad-hoc reporting.
  • Query studio out-of-the-box is a bit primitive. It is used for ad-hoc reporting, but if something is changed in Query Studio by and end user, it's not possible to see what exactly was changed without going into Report Studio. This is problematic as it means that end users need licenses for Report Studio which is not feasible.
  • Metric studio we have not used at all, and don't know exact purpose of it.
It would be great if there were better performance monitoring activities like those available in Microstrategy.

It would also be great if there were an option to rename columns and query subjects without modifying all existing reports.
  • Single version of truth. We have centralized all reporting to one tool.
Cognos needs to reduce the number of studios and try to consolidate everything into one or two studios. It's currently very confusing from a licensing standpoint, but it's also a training issue: It's quite difficult to explain which Studio does what and which one people should be using for which task.

Need better performance monitoring tool.

Using IBM Cognos

300 - Energy Marketing, C-store, Terminal & Refining.
  • Market Basket Analysis.
  • Email canned reports.
  • Single version of truth.

Evaluating Cognos and Competitors

Six years back we switched from Microstrategy to Cognos.

Cognos Implementation

Installation is pretty straight forward.
  • Implemented in-house

Cognos Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Training facility and instructor are exceptionally good.
The problem with online training sessions is that you tend to feel disconnected. It's difficult to ask questions and the lack of visual cues tends to make the experience much less effective than a face-to-face learning environment.
IBM documents are good to learn all by yourself.

Configuring Cognos

Cognos Support

We are pleased with support. There is no major concern in that area.
No - In last 6 years, we have used limited support.

Using Cognos

Very user friendly.

Cognos Reliability

Very stable tool.
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.

Integrating Cognos

  • Various .Net based applications.
  • SAP ECC 6.0.
Integration with .NET applications works well. Integration with the transaction SAP ERP systems also works pretty well, but integration with the SAP Business Warehouse is a different matter. We tried twice to integrate with the BW and failed each time. We have now abandoned that effort as it was a waste of time and money.
  • Amazon cloud.

Relationship with IBM

We negotiated CPU based licensing instead of core based.