IBM Cognos Analytics Features

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.

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.

The ability to visualize data in many way all using the same utility is beneficial so we don't have to worry about multiple deployment/support patterns. Having an in-memory OLAP option made performance less of an issue compared to hitting an on-prem database directly for everything. The ability to add custom code allows for some really creative solutions to unique business problems in reporting.

We felt the interface and functionality was a little dated - our more technical employees were fine but the more analyst-type developers preferred something "prettier"/"friendlier" like Tableau/Power BI. It also got expensive for us which was one of the two the primary reasons we transitioned. This is obviously dependent on the number of users, so consider your own environment of course.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Report building was intuitive for a power user but average users found it overwhelming. This just meant a bit more training from my department.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

Cognos tool suite is perfect for your enterprise needs, with different tool available for different user level. The tool can handle all the reporting needs (charts, table, list, crosstab). With the addition of active reports and Cognos mobile it makes a complete solution

Enhancement of geographical reporting, current available option for Maps are very limited and should be extended.

I love the fact that Cognos Analytics is so flexible as we deal with a lot of reports which needs to be emailed to the higher authorities as and when they run. Cognos has this inbuild feature, where it can also write the reports to the internal file system. This helps us to keep a track of the recipients of the reports.

The Cognos 10 version was a little laid back on the visualization side as it did not had much interactive visuals available for reporting. But they have overcome it in Cognos 11 version.

Unfortunately, there is not much to write in this section. The only possible "pro" in all cases would be the flexibility offered in the product as far as setting up the framework. Other than that, not much to like.

User interface was slow and clumsy. The user experience was not smooth at all. There was no ease of use whatsoever. The retrieval times from the back end were even worse. We had to retrofit an existing n-tier system to use the reporting side of this software and it was a disaster. There is no way I would recommend to anyone to purchase this system.

Cognos has such great data available and we use it through our HRIS - it has changed the way we report out on data

The only hard thing is getting used to the reporting, but once you learn then it is smooth sailing!!

I had used the IBM Cognod Sales Compensation tool while working a global high tech company. It took a while to learn the system but once you figure it out then it was easy to use and configure the plans.

The only issue I had at the time was the very long time it would take to run a calculations. Average was an hour.

It can handle enormous amounts of data and allows a user to create extremely complex data models from almost any number of disparate sources

Super complex and difficult to learn. The least intuitive software I have ever used, and the help documentation is pretty much useless.

I would definitely recommend this to people who want to create effective dashboards and reports. It has user friendly interface. I is good alternative for tableau or power BI.

It needs to upgrade a little bit to give features like Power BI

I like its functionality and different features. I also like the ease of use.

Cognos's support sometimes is not as it should be. The support should be quick and accurate, and Cognos should have more error details to track down the solution. The majority of time, the error doesn't provide meaningful info, so it is always difficulty to track down the solution.

Cognos has some good time based accounting features that allow you to go back and look at how much was booked and when.

Getting the Cognos reports to match up. Some reports update once a week others are daily. This makes it difficult to see how much is actually going to be spent. Having to pull multiple reports to get the information that is needed wastes time.

The ability to create custom reports makes it user friendly for anyone to figure out

the cubes tend to be confusing for file storage

I like the ability to create reports on the fly.

I do not have any dislikes other than the staged rollout of pieces of my prior firm's datamart.

This software is very flexible and extensive enough to meet almost any of your needs. The reporting engine allows for complex queries and views that far surpass standard reporting methods.

While I was not involved in the purchase of the software it is my understanding the cost was a little high and this is not designed for novice users.

IBM Cognos Analytics, software di BI, dispone di una suite completa di funzionalità di reporting, dashboarding, data exploration e data modeling. Il modulo reporting, che utilizzo di frequente, il quale ha un motore basato su SQL, permette di creare report dettagliati, utilizzando input multi-fonte, e disponendo i dati in modo strategico grazie alla possibilità di manipolarli con query SQL. Un altro...

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IBM Cognos Analytics ha un ammanco nella gestione della governare, elemento necessario in un software di BI. Infatti il software non dispone di opzioni per gestire il ciclo di vita dei dati, elemento fondamentale per organizzazione di un certo livello con dimensione ragguardevoli.

The software is highly intuitive since it recognizes the demands of the business and promotes work productivity; it can manage a big quantity of data and allows all departments to easily build reports to examine the data. While reporting, you may effortlessly combine numerous searches or arrange your data; no background or technical expertise is necessary. The process is quite fluid, and compared to other cloud services I've tried, IBM Cognos offers a well-designed interface that is simple to educate personnel on. Reports give significant detail that can be exported and edited to explain crucial choices. They are simple to run and compatible with office applications.

Reports may take some time to execute depending on their size; reporting software may include cautions about where students committed errors and the report will not run; alternatively, more thorough instructions for new employees are provided. You obviously require proper training, and anyone who aren't familiar with SQL will struggle to put it up. I've been seeing some delays while switching sites or loading materials, but I appreciate IBM's ability to work on this issue.