External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
My main use case for IBM Cognos is to generate reports for clients and maintain IBM Cognos. My company is a retail company that provides the best price solutions to clients, and we use client data to generate reports in IBM Cognos.
In terms of my main use case for IBM Cognos, we also focus on IBM Cognos upgradation and maintenance. Whenever IBM Cognos is down, we investigate the issue and fix it.
The best features IBM Cognos offers include good security and easy configuration. The setup is not complicated.
What I appreciate about the security features in IBM Cognos is that if you want to build it from the start, it is not complicated, as it only takes a few steps, around five to seven steps to configure it. Security-wise, we have separate gemstones in our organization, which makes it very useful when you go through gemstones across prod, QA, and dev environments.
Regarding the features, the dashboard and integration in IBM Cognos are also easy to use. We have one server administration where we configure client information such as SQL information, JDBC connection strings, permissions, and groups. We manage which groups can access particular reports and handle all of that.
IBM Cognos has positively impacted my organization. As of now, we are also working with Looker in parallel. IBM Cognos generates reports very fast and quickly. Generating a report takes hardly two to three seconds, making it faster compared to Looker.
IBM Cognos can improve its error messages, as whenever something is wrong, it does not give us the proper error message, and we end up rebooting the entire software.
Additionally, they can improve the documentation. I believe restarting IBM Cognos takes time, around three to five minutes, so they can work on that as well.
I have been using IBM Cognos for the last three years.
In terms of stability, IBM Cognos performs at 95 percent reliability.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is fine.
We have never been in a situation where we needed to contact customer support.
Hopefully, I have seen a return on investment with IBM Cognos. Only one or two people in our organization initially knew about IBM Cognos, and later on, I learned about it as well. This demonstrates that it requires a lesser number of people. You do not need a huge team for maintaining or working with IBM Cognos.
Before choosing IBM Cognos, I believe we were looking into Looker as well, since both are similar solutions.
My advice to others looking into using IBM Cognos is that if they have not used anything else, they can proceed with it, as it is good and easy to set up. Everything appears to be good with IBM Cognos. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.
My main use case for IBM Cognos is building report authoring, scheduling, and bursting to multiple recipients with parameterized outputs. IBM Cognos has a use case around risk and fraud analytics, especially being a bank, where we need to check and measure against different kinds of frauds that should not exceed certain thresholds. Additionally, I utilize it for customer and product analytics regarding profitability dashboards and real-time dashboards to analyze how our customers interact with newly released features and marketing offers.
A specific example of how I use IBM Cognos for risk and fraud analytics is in the financial services sector, where recently there has been a rise in frauds and scams. Our customers often receive calls from fraudulent individuals asking for their one-time passwords or passwords, particularly targeting older folks who are not tech-savvy, leading to the draining of their retirement and pension savings. There have also been e-commerce-oriented frauds lately, and we have a dedicated team on fraud analytics that uses IBM Cognos to tackle these issues.
IBM Cognos helps audit database records for user activity and report runs while tracking how certain fields change over time. It allows me to monitor specific types of fraud to determine if the incidence percentage has increased recently or if new fraud types are emerging in specific geographic areas. These audits and oversight functionalities are extremely useful for us.
IBM Cognos offers very high security for sensitive customer data, including features like query vaults and dynamic RLS. It provides several macros and security filters for governance purposes, which are beneficial. Additionally, it facilitates the distribution of generated reports across wider forums within the company, not just limited to a specific business unit or team. The flexibility to be hosted as either a SaaS setup, an on-premise setup, or on cloud platforms like AWS or Azure is another unique capability of the product.
IBM Cognos's security features, including query walls and dynamic RLS, help my team by preventing exposure of our queries to hackers and malicious parties. Our dedicated cybersecurity team ensures that sensitive data does not become public, making it crucial that data stored in IBM Cognos remains secure throughout the entire data cycle, which is where these enterprise-grade security measures prove invaluable.
IBM Cognos offers very responsive and highly interactive dashboards, allowing effective reporting capabilities. The Excel packs generated can be drilled through and filtered efficiently, reducing the need for deeper Excel expertise. Data aggregation and segregation are effectively managed through IBM Cognos.
The positive impact of IBM Cognos on my organization is notable; previously, the reports we were using did not meet the expectations of our managers and heads of departments, often leading to criticism. Now, we experience far fewer complaints from management, who are generally satisfied with the details of both high-level summaries and technical breakdowns when needed, enhancing our management efficiency.
Management efficiency has improved significantly as decision-making has become much faster. Management now has clarity in deciding which products to continue, which to scrap, or where to invest more resources, with enhanced visibility facilitating these decisions.
IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals. Additionally, hybrid deployments, bursting workloads, and licensing guidelines are areas that could be better refined in their cloud version. Furthermore, considering the trend towards AI in many recent software solutions, an AI assistant that aids in accomplishing tasks could be a valuable addition.
I have been using IBM Cognos for three years.
IBM Cognos is very stable overall.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is satisfactory. Around 30 people in my team are using it, but I do not have more detailed data on scalability metrics.
We previously used Microsoft Power BI as part of the Microsoft suite before migrating to IBM Cognos.
While there were not any tangible savings, the streamlined decision-making process for management was a significant positive impact. Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
I believe the pricing structure I recall was around $11 per user per month for the standard cloud version of IBM Cognos. However, our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
Before choosing IBM Cognos, we evaluated Tableau, but its higher pricing structure led to its consideration being dropped.
My advice for others considering IBM Cognos is to weigh their specific organizational needs against available tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense. If there are more complex or organization-specific requirements, switching to IBM Cognos can be beneficial. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.
My main use case for IBM Cognos is that this software has great benefits, especially for the BI and data mining aspects, all focused on the decision-making aspect within our organization.
In my organization, we use IBM Cognos Analytics for decision-making, particularly for data reporting, tracking personnel, supply chain, timeline, and many more.
IBM Cognos Analytics has positively impacted my organization by reducing report formulation time by 60%, especially for templated recurring reports such as the monthly sales report. The improved decision-making speed has been enhanced with IBM Cognos self-service dashboard and AI-driven data exploration, while automated distribution and uptime, scheduled report delivery, and bursting have eliminated various manual emailing and delays.
The improved decision-making speed allows us to know if our business is doing well and how our customers are relating to our products. This enables us to determine which products are moving better and which are not performing as well, allowing us to focus more energy and resources on improving the products for better market value.
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily.
Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks.
Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team.
IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.
I believe IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
Although IBM Cognos supports mobile functionality, the experience can be improved, as the app is not fully responsive or fluid. Features such as interactive filtering and dashboard creation are not user-friendly on a small screen. It would be beneficial if the mobile user experience were improved with better touch-friendly controls and offline viewing options.
I have been using IBM Cognos for the past 10 years.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
IBM Cognos can handle my organization's growth and increasing data needs efficiently.
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
I previously used Microsoft Power BI before switching to IBM Cognos.
I switched from Microsoft Power BI to IBM Cognos primarily because IBM Cognos Analytics is robust in terms of reporting, governance, and scheduling, while Power BI excels in use, interactivity, and visuals. IBM Cognos Analytics has an edge over Power BI for enterprise-grade structured reporting needs, which is why we made the switch.
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable. Although there may be some complexity during setup, the support is always available to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Before choosing IBM Cognos, I evaluated other options, including SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence.
IBM Cognos is well suited for financial reporting, handling complex, pixel-perfect, multi-page reports with scheduled delivery to stakeholders, such as sales reports by region on a quarterly basis. It can operationally create dashboards across departments and combine multiple data sources such as ERP, CRM, Excel, and many more, with filters and embedded AI insights to enable organizations to make data-driven decisions easily.
I appreciate IBM Cognos for its inbuilt AI feature, which helps uncover data patterns and forecasts, providing useful quick data-supported recommendations without heavy analysis. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.