A great solution for your financial planning
Avantages
It has integration with with other IBM products like business intelligence. The excel functionality is great for finances. The product to meet our needs perfectly for all our needs.
Inconvénients
Creating reports is overwhelming at the beginning but if you dedicate time and resources there will be the face of your deployment.
New age and Traditional BI tool
Cognos is used for operational reporting and analytics and schedule reports to be sent via email to users on a duly basis. Used in mobile as well.
Avantages
Cognos 11 comes with all the latest features expected in a BI tool, the graph generations and story buildings as well as predictions.
Inconvénients
Interactive pdf is not available for reports. Can be difficult to implement without admin support for end users.
Cognos - A good Enterprise Reporting Tool
I used Cognos as an analytical tool by linking our ERP (Microsoft Dynamic NAV) to it. All the financial data would be mapped & a lot of customized reports were taken out like Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). The user interface is pretty good. The CUBEs are little confusing but once you get the grip they work very well. The ability to drill down the reports to very basic level is a plus point
A little tough to learn & customize. It's a little slow when dealing with a medium amount of data.
Avantages
Easily integrating with most of the ERPs, very good for customizing reports, very detailed reporting
Inconvénients
Tough to learn & not many resources available, you will get the value of the money invested in it only if you are able to get the most out of it
Enterprise Reporting and Analytics Tool
It has been a solid tool for our company for last so many years. IT meets out current needs in terms of performance and capabilities. However, as we start exploring more cutting edge technologies like cloud, SAAS and Advanced Analytics, we see the tool is not in the top 3.
Avantages
Well established took with huge user base and support. Being IBMs main BI tool, it comes with a lot of Support and Knowledge Base. There are tons of supporting products for Advanced Analytics, Visualization and AI/ML which makes the tool both powerful and versatile. It fits into both departmental BI as well as for Enterprise wide reporting.
Inconvénients
IBM should increase the support the provide for their products. It is difficult to get quick help from IBM.Self service features of the tool and not as easy as other contemporary tools like Tableau and Qlikview. IBM has catching up to do in this area. Also cloud based SAAS is not yet advanced for COGNOS.
Cognos
it is a great software depends on the the organisation ability to set up and master its capabilities
Avantages
Capabilities of this software is far reaching and varied and it depends on the organisation ability to use it to their advantage.
Inconvénients
the support from the consultant was great but costly.
My Review of IBM Cognos Analytics
I use IBM Cognos daily, as this is the tool made available by SAP Concur to work with Business Intelligence reports. I use it to provide the necessary information to those who require it, and it works more or less like a database, where you can apply SQL language - but in a slightly different format.
Avantages
I think this tool is quite good, since it allows the user several functionalities: create and adapt BI reports, automate the export of a report in a set period and for the necessary containers (they do not need a license to receive), etc. . I love working with this tool from IBM. It allows some SQL language, and some configuration features that are very good too.
Inconvénients
One thing I can point out as a cons of this tool, is the fact that it does not always return the correct information (because the user, without knowing it, can mix incompatible information) - and only at a more advanced stage do we notice that the information is not correct - because we have no error information.
When we actually have information about the errors, this is also not very detailed, that is, we are left without knowing what the error is anyway. It is difficult to make correct associations in this tool, because it is very restricted in relation to the use of the database and the compatibility of the data between them.
Powerful, Reliable, Expensive
I've been working with IBM Cognos since version 8.4
I like this product and see how IBM is improving it.
Avantages
It's been a long on the market.
It's offered by IBM
It has a great integration with many databases
Inconvénients
New version (CA 11) has some inconvenient UI changes (new side panel which does not allow to easily navigate and see all properties)
Many things need to be done manually instead of integrating as best practices (security, deployments, testing, version control, etc.)
New studios are not that intuitive / transparent
Cognos is sophisticated BI application for large enterprises
Cognos is one of 2 major Business Intelligence tools on the market. If it is implemented correctly, it could provide complete web-based business solution based on the data analysis. It is a platform which allowing to deliver mission critical analytics to the business including but not limited to Enterprise reporting, Planning & Forecast, OLAP cubes technology, etc.
Avantages
- The application designed to enable business users with limited technical knowledge to extract data, analyze it and make business decision based on the analysis;
- It could be used within relational or multidimensional data sources;
- It is included a mobile version allowing users to access a complete version of Cognos from mobile devices;
Inconvénients
- very sensitive in implementation;
- requiring significant resources in order to maintain and support;
- too expensive for mid-size companies;
Powerful but complicated
Implementing the tool is painful but once is running is great.
Avantages
Being a IBM product it pack quality. great functionalities and features that defeat the competition.
Inconvénients
It's hard to setup.
Installation and configuration process is a pain.
The space usage for this software is to high.
The IBM Windows services is slow on startup and service errors can be very difficult to diagnose due to bad log structure or description.
Cognos Developer
Avantages
Cognos is a great tool for reporting. The visuals are not awesome but there is a lot of customization you can do for reporting.
Inconvénients
It can be difficult to learn at first. It is not as easy to pick up as Tabeau. Googling for solutions can be tough.
COGNOS
Cognos makes it easy to design reports that match the look-and-feel required by the client. Report rendering time is also very fast. Browser support can be touchy and Dynamic Cubes are very hardware intensive.Cognos has strong out of the box capabilities with a wide array of add-ons, and good interoperability with other IBM analytics and data suites
Avantages
Compatibility mode queries allow for custom ODBC and JDBC connection to made, so even if there is no native compatibility other databases can still be used as a source if needed.
Dynamic Cubes are capable of querying against millions of rows in seconds when properly set up with sufficient hardware resources.
Standard Reports are snappy, returning data and rendering quickly, as long as the pagination is kept to reasonable quantities.
Inconvénients
Due to Active Reports packaging all of the data in the file and prerendering charts, file size can get quite large (easily several megabytes) and the initial load time can be quite long when opening it. It is best used for basic overviews and other times when some "flash" is needed, but not a large amount of data.
Configuring the interoperability with TM1 and SPSS is a little more on the technical side than most other tasks.
You could call the development process "Front heavy" meaning most of the development will be modeling. This means that it will take longer to end up with visualized data than other tools.
One Of The Best Self-service BI Software
one of the best complete solution for delivering insights from data at enterprise level
Avantages
the powerful framework manager, allow us to implement complicated logic into model and deliver a package to end user, business user can do ad-hoc report easily.
Inconvénients
steep learning curve for beginners. not mention people who doesn't have BI experience, Had a few new team members from tableau background. the FM package complexity is much more than they have done in the tableau data source.
Cognos Review
Overall, if there is a company that wishes to automate it's reports and improve efficiency across their organization, Cognos is a must-have tool. There is a bit of upfront cost involved to get the reports created in Cognos but the efficiency achieved is almost unparalleled.
Avantages
Cognos is an incredibly powerful reporting tool offered by IBM and it has a wonderful ability to be customized across different industries and companies. It can transform work efficiency but automating virtually any data that exists in a company's primary accounting and finance system.
Inconvénients
Cognos is not very user-friendly and often times it can take a while for an individual working with Congos to get familiar with the functionality and the power this tool possesses. Furthermore, report writing and query studio functionality require some database knowledge so the true power of the tool is sometimes limited by these factors.
Business Intellegnce Software with Standard Reporting And Self Service BI
Overall it is a great product to use
Avantages
Cognos Analytics is a flexible software for Standard Business Intelligence Reporting as well as for Self Service Data Visualization capability. You have the option to connect to a variety of the Data Sources as well as Multi-Dimensional Cubes. The new invention of Cognos Analytics software provides a greater flexibility for enterprise deployments and upgrades. It has the new feature of NLP (natural language processing) for predictive analytics by IBM Watson.
Inconvénients
Too many modelling tools (Cognos FrameWork Manager, Dynamic Cube Designer, Cognos Transformer) for modelling the content. Too many studios (Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio) for report development. Maintainence and cost is huge
The best software for business forecasts with functionalities for creating scenarios and sandboxes for each user.
TM1 allows you to build business models that display online results available to all authorized users of the organization.
Avantages
IBM Cognos TM1 facilitates the creation of business models with the participation and contribution of users throughout the organization regardless of their physical location.
TM1 is a enterprise-level platform that allows an integral, flexible, rigorous and perfect control over the users that contribute with the creation of the budget.
It allows building multidimensional models that incorporate the business rules that govern the financial processes of the company.
Inconvénients
IBM Cognos TM1 needs to train personnel to administer the platform.
The construction of the models requires specialized IT staff.
The cost of the licenses is for medium and large companies.
IBM Cognos Review
My company has been using IBM Cognos for the past 4 years. When we purchased IBM Cognos it was the best fit for our situation. It has been a valued piece of software in our business. It has given us the ability to tie data from multiple data sources. It has given the ability for our departments to run reports that we haven't been able to in the past.
Avantages
The software is very intuitive. If you have knowledge of SQL, it is a very easy software to pick up. The Help portion of the Cognos interface is very helpful also.
Inconvénients
Customer Support for this product isn't the best. We have been on Cognos 10.1.1 for a while and when it came up for licensing renewal, we were charged for a newer version of Data Manger. When we inquired about this through our support contract we were going to be charged for the new software.
Great capabilities, but really difficult to use practically.
Avantages
Cognos Analytics has really great capabilities. There is so much that you can do with the framework if you know what you're doing. Good security features. Good for enterprise level reporting.
Inconvénients
If you're hoping this will replace a dedicated reporting team or IT team, it will not. The ease of use depends on several factors and be SURE that you have an experienced team built the framework. No support whatsoever from Cognos themselves for end users, and they take a long time to get back to us on issues. The new visualizations can be clunky, especially maps. They are unusable for detailed maps. Scheduling features slow down the system considerably.
Invaluable Business Intelligence
Data is extremely vital to any organization and the ability to generate useful reports and dashboards on demand across multiple sources is invaluable.
Avantages
Scheduling reports, configuring prompt pages on reports for users to run a standardized report with custom filters are both fantastic features that I used hundreds of times across all reporting.
Inconvénients
Report building was intuitive for a power user but average users found it overwhelming. This just meant a bit more training from my department.
Great Analytics Tool
Overall, I would recommend using Cognos Analytics for data analysis. My whole company uses it from daily reporting to more advanced analyses.
Avantages
IBM Cognos Analytics is a great data analytics tool. It can handle a lot of data and makes it easy for users to create reports to view their data. I like that it allows for a variety of output formats.
Inconvénients
Cognos Analytics can be hard to learn how to use. You have to really understand your data first so that you can figure out how to make the tool do what you need it to do.
This report writer is linked to our accounting software.
Avantages
You can write your own reports and pull out the data you need from our accounting software. You have the ability to create advanced reports and format in multiple ways.
Inconvénients
Sometimes the fields that are in Cognos do not match exactly or have different names from the actual software so it is a guess at what field you are pulling. The report studio portion is advanced report writing and in order to create these reports it is recommended to have additional training in order to make reports be beneficial for your company.
valuable yet expensive
overall its good and it is one of the initiators in the reporting market. We are still using it and find it quite useful to fulfill our client requirements.
Avantages
you can combine multiple queries in one report to create your desired report, which can be formatted in multiple ways to meet your desired structure.
Inconvénients
its little bit tricky to handle. You need to understand it thoroughly which actually takes time to began working with it from scratch. Also lacks the graphics and user interface.
Cognos pulls meaning out of any data
It gives big data meaning and helps us answer business question so we can make smart decisions and provide relevant and cleanly formatted data to our customers.
Avantages
It is straight-forward and feature-rich. We have combined dozens and dozens of queries into a single report without any issue before, so it has that advantage over most of the alternative solutions.
Inconvénients
The version of Cognos we are running currently makes it difficult to pinpoint the bottle-neck of certain reports.
I feel Cognos is the best BI Product that I have come across.
Data Analytics, Dashboards, Complex KPI reports, Event studio objects
Avantages
Very structured, Reporting features are very good and we can make use of various functions, Event studio tool is the most powerful.
Inconvénients
I wish if natural language feature is added to Cognos. When it comes to the calculated fields we need to write functions in Cognos, but if IBM Cognos can make built in functions like Microsoft power BI then that would be awesome. High pricing is another factor.
A self-service analytics platform that is able to fulfill almost all BI needs
Avantages
Handles all BI products very well, including but not limited to self-served reporting structure, reports, cubes, dashboards, and scorecards.
Project deployment and duplication are easy and quick.
Inconvénients
User administration could be very time-consuming and we use a third-party tool (which is not free of charge).
Product upgrade is not simple enough and has to be planned and conducted with extra caution.
Good Tool for Data Reporting
IBM Cognos Analytics is a great enterprise tool for data reporting. There are a lot of report options and it is easy to collaborate and share reports with colleagues.
Avantages
IBM Cognos Analytics is a great tool for data reporting. It is easy to use and easy to see data relationships. It has a lot of reporting options and the folder structure is nice.
Inconvénients
It can be kind of hard to learn and there are not a ton of helpful resources online.
Take your time and implement it right and the rewards will be very good.