IBM Cognos Reviews

My primary use case for IBM Cognos is reporting.

I work with a few organizations. IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team. For example, we know which offers work and which offers don't. We've got a very good record of that. We have the very good ability to check the meetings of the actual salespeople. When they are made, who is in them, how effective the meetings were compared to what we estimated. It's very, very good on that level.

Additionally, the budget control is very good. We get triggers once a budget is crossed. It creates and sends an email to the person who needs to know, "Hey, you're in trouble. Basically, you've crossed the line." Which a lot of times you don't realize. You have a team of 20 people and the manager gets an email if somebody has done something or there's a problem, and it gives them a very strong awareness.

IBM Cognos' feature that I have found most valuable is its ability to create very complex reports which are not available in other tools.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful.

I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring.

I have been implementing IBM Cognos for over 20 years.

I think they're very stable.

IBM Cognos is the most scalable option, I think. It can handle thousands of users at the same time. If anything, the only thing you need is hardware that can support it.

This product is usually focused on medium to large organizations.

I'm really satisfied with the technical support. We encountered a couple of very unique bugs and IBM was very helpful. People from IBM found a quick workaround and then they solved the problem. So I'm very happy with it.

The initial setup usually takes a few hours.

You need a consultant or an integrator for setup. You need somebody to do it. You can't just do it by yourself.

In terms of pricing, for what you get, it's a relatively good price. It's good value for what you pay for. But you always want things for cheaper, but the price for what you get is relatively good, because everything is included. Everything, all the extra features that with other products you have to pay for, here they are just included. It's in it. You don't have to pay for sending out emails, you don't need to have an extra mail server. It's in the product.

On a scale of one to ten I would give IBM Cognos a nine.

I would suggest to potential customers that if they don't have experience, there is a lot of information on the web. There are wonderful video clips in YouTube. There are wonderful blogs. Before you decide on a solution, check. There might be something that's even better than what you thought initially. The abilities are so wide and amazing that a lot of times people take a solution which is not the best, because they do what they know and they don't think, "Hey, I can do something much better."

Make sure you know all the options before you choose one. And again, reconsider. If you checked it three or four versions ago, then check again. There are new features all the time that are changing and improving, and you can get amazing results.

We are a solution provider. We come up with the business requirements for our clients, and then we provide a complete solution for catering to their specific needs.

We come up with a customized BPM or a BA or another analytical solution and we offer them as a package. 

IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions. You have Report Studio and Analytics Studio, where they have different tools for designing reports. These include report templates and comping up with canned reports.

The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved. The way they have designed the framework, the framework manager is a critical part. If you have a properly-designed framework manager then whatever stories you generate through the Report Studio or Query Studio will give you better results. However, if the modeling is incorrect then it will kill your free memory and detract from the performance.

You have to have complete control of the data model, including the hierarchy and the relationships. There are still a lot of loose ends. The way that a many-to-many relationship can be defined within the framework should be brought into the Report Studio and Query Studio. This would be an improvement. 

There can be a recursive effect, where you are pulling resources away from the users. This will eat away the resources and cause them a lot of lag time in their reporting.

We have been working with IBM Cognos for almost 25 years, since 1996 or 1997. 

The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises. These higher licensing costs are why we recommend Pentaho or Talend for the SME segment. For them, they have to minimize the total cost of ownership. This segment is also interested in open-source enterprise solutions, which will reduce their costs to a large extent.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to ensure that they are clear with the business requirements. You have to define the model in the first place, so you want to design the model with all of the business hierarchies and attributes so that there will be no further re-working it, or any re-production of work in the future. This means that you have to plan your model, get a model, and then framework manage your model well in advance. Then your reporting and analytics will be very good.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use for the solution is just pure BI (Business Intelligence) delivery.  

After centralizing the data, the people using the product have the ability to view all the numbers through one single platform. It is also providing them the information they need in order to make their business decisions.  

Cognos has a drag-and-drop interface for selecting packages to use in creating their own ad hoc reports and this makes it very easy to use. A second thing that is valuable is the way that it allows you to customize the security.  

So far we do not have any issues with the functionality. The cost per year could be improved. They are the leader in the industry and they charge a lot. If you are the end-user and you want to work with the leader you cannot complain about the cost and you have to pay for it.  

If they were going to make improvements, I would say that they could do more related to big data. I think they were lacking in the initial phases of development in this area. I am not sure if they may have addressed these concerns already because I have not seen their new capabilities in more recent releases. But initially, it was lacking strength in the area of big data.  

I have been using this product since I joined this company is 2013. So I have been using it for about seven years.  

We have been running the Cognos environment from 2013 onward. In that time, I have never seen a single instance of it going down. The small bugs come and go just like that. There have been a few small bugs, but never anything that was around for long. Even a product like Microsoft which has tremendous development resources is releasing monthly patches. Every product will have small issues.  

We currently have mostly data management people using the product and that is a total of about 200 people using the reports.  

In my lifetime, I have never had to call technical support for Cognos. That is from my experience. I never had any issue that was too difficult to deal with myself and I never needed to go to them directly. I have no first-hand experience with support. It probably suggests something about the quality of the product if in seven years you never have to consult the company for technical support.  

We have not switched. We chose it because it was the industry leader in this category. It was our initial selection and we never went back.  

The setup is straightforward. If the organization has a very complex architecture, I would say it might take many months to implement it properly. But setting up the environment is normally just a couple of hours or maybe a day or two of work. Generally, I would say it is easy to do the initial setup. It was easy for us.  

I think as per my understanding, everyone has their own criterion and measure for the way a product fits into their scenario. If they have the resources and can budget for the investment in this product and if they have the kind of infrastructure that warrants the investment, definitely to go for this product. If the business or user has budget constraints, I would say there are a lot more other options. It comes down to the capabilities of the different solutions and how they satisfy user needs.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product a seven-out-of-ten. I keep three points back because I feel that in being a leader, they are missing some of the functionality that they should have already which is somewhat basic. Everything it should be supporting is not there. Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say.  

Our primary use case for this solution is reporting and analytics.

This solution has helped us in the distribution of reporting content to one hundred and fifty users. It has also helped in the management of self-service BI.

The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility).

This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how.

I am an architect who builds solutions. I have 20 years of experience with translating business needs for BI and data warehouse solutions.

We get to create customized solutions for many users. In our organization, we reach 40% of the employees with information from the data warehouse.

• The ability to build solutions that can be changed so that the solution is up to date. The possibility of integrating third parties through HTML and Java code in a supported way. 
• It's possible to add to the role management and security that can be maintained.

• Continue to develop the AI assistant so we can add business logic to the metadata. 
• Ability to insert own graphs in D3 through supported API. 
• Prompting should be better.

We use it as our main reporting tool for implementing BI solutions. We have been using the whole Cognos suite for a while now.

The upgraded visualizations and more user-friendly interface have increased the acceptance rate of this tool.

• Ability to connect to a number of databases
• Framework manager modelling
• Data modules
• Building ad hoc reports from CSV files.

The latest visualization doesn't give much flexibility to the users in terms of what can be changed. For example, there are fixed palettes. The dashboard interface needs tremendous improvement as it's not very fast as compared to Tableau and the likes.

My primary use case for this solution is for analytics and monitoring event metrics.

It's very easy to use. You can use cubes, you can create reports and you can create dashboards in it. It's all in one. Also, the integration on Cognos Analytics with Cognos IT Analytics also is better. 

We have found this solution evolve over the years, it is now very user-friendly.

The charts and graphics are very weak. You can find some dashboards, but it is very rigid. It is not as fancy as what you find in another solution, like Microsoft BI.

We considered Microsoft BI.

For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent.

We use it for standard reporting in the platform, and we are satisfied with the product.

1. It helps us deliver information to people in different functions. 
2. It is possible to have people make their own reports, so they have service functionality.

A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports. 

We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics.

The latest version is very stable. We have not had any problems.

I have found no problems with scalability. With a good server, everything works.

IBM Cognos can improve in this area. Both IBM and our company do research to find solutions, and we are sometimes faster than they are in providing the solution that works, usually by studying documents. 

We can use the normal routines sufficiently to solve problems. However, if we try to add components which are not streamlined or well-known, we have to work it out without the technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I was not involved in this process. The product was chosen 18 years ago.

We always return to the same vendors, such as IBM, SAP, and Tableau. If there is an existing environment where a lot of reports are outdated, changes need to be made. If we have a running system that is up with no technical problems and the price is not changing drastically, then no change is necessary.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10, because of the support. Other than support, everything works.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: When we search for a vendor, we always make comparisons between them. In France, we were surprised by the product, what it delivers, and what is included in the package. There are a lot of different tools on the market that deliver on some points, but not all.

Cognos Analytics gives us a lot of possibilities, including dashboarding, which you would have to purchase additionally from other providers. Every three or four years, we do some benchmarking to analyze the product.