A great solution for your financial planning
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
Cognos 11 comes with all the latest features expected in a BI tool, the graph generations and story buildings as well as predictions.
Cons
Interactive pdf is not available for reports. Can be difficult to implement without admin support for end users.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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 - 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.
Pros
Easily integrating with most of the ERPs, very good for customizing reports, very detailed reporting
Cons
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
Cognos
it is a great software depends on the the organisation ability to set up and master its capabilities
Pros
Capabilities of this software is far reaching and varied and it depends on the organisation ability to use it to their advantage.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
One Of The Best Self-service BI Software
one of the best complete solution for delivering insights from data at enterprise level
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
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.
Pros
It's been a long on the market.
It's offered by IBM
It has a great integration with many databases
Cons
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
IBM Cognos Analytics allows me to access our data warehouse
I mainly use it to get data from the customer information system. Cognos allows me access to customer information without getting access to the other system.
Pros
We use Cognos to access our customer info. The IT team set ups the report and we are able to export it for viewing and analysis. If built correctly, the reports can be easily run by the users. The users do need to know how to enter the parameters and known the data structure to fully utilitzed Cognos. We run Cognos through the browser. No need to install software.
Cons
Users need to understand the data structure in order to enter parameters. If the parameters are not entered correct, there will be no data, exports, or graphs. You also need to make sure the back-end servers are fast if you have a lot of data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio
I would recommend for company reporting, works great with a big database
Pros
Complex reports can be achieved with IBM Cognos Report studio, great for setting up scheduled reports.
Cons
Interface is not user friendly, certain features are not logically placed.Charts are not great when downloaded into Excel.
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
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
Report building was intuitive for a power user but average users found it overwhelming. This just meant a bit more training from my department.
This report writer is linked to our accounting software.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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
Pros
Very structured, Reporting features are very good and we can make use of various functions, Event studio tool is the most powerful.
Cons
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.
Powerful tool for the good analysis of your data. can get quick information for quick decisions
Pros
Cognos is a very effective BI tool. you can create customized reports without having a very technical background ... It can be easily integrated with several data sources in a simple and consistent way and I find the interface to extract data on demand or send scheduled reports (Report Planner) excellent. good user experience with the drag and drop. . . versatility of the Live API to postgres, sql server and oracle databases. We use Cognos to deliver operational reports to all production units and great and very well presented reports and productivity indicators to senior managers
Cons
It is a very powerful tool but not as easy to understand quickly as other tools on the market for the same price .. The learning curve is broad. The initial configuration is not easy, the dashboard function does not have many options. Installation can also be a complicated issue and may require vendor support
A self-service analytics platform that is able to fulfill almost all BI needs
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.