IBM Cognos Analytics vs. RapidMiner

I use predictive analytics techniques, which can help me predict my future sales based on collected data, giving me insight into my market's trends.This market data can be analyzed, giving me the opportunity to gain in-depth insight into my market's competition and positioning it competitively, aided by developing strategies to improve my marketing approach.

Incentivized

RapidMiner is the best tool to build models on textual data. It is rich in ML algorithms and reduces the need to manually tune the parameters. It automatically optimizes them, thus providing a better solution. RapidMiner again extends great capability for data preparation, its insane connections to almost every data source pulls in the data easily into one environment. And it can comfortably perform data cleaning and process tasks over that. RapidMiner is not so good with image, audio or video data. These data points cannot be used directly in their raw form. They must be transformed into some intermediate form for performing analytics over it. Moreover, there are no connectors to directly pull data from their varied sources. For example, we don't have a connector to read audio data directly from a switch and then convert it to text (although Google speech API is available for audio to text conversion.)

Incentivized

• Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
• Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
• Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.

Incentivized

• RapidMiner Studio offers a superb user interface with an intuitive workflow paradigm that is very easy to learn.
• RapidMiner Studio’s operators make it a complete and powerful tool for data preprocessing, data visualization, and data mining/analytics.
• RapidMiner Studio provides excellent documentation, countless worked examples, training and support via a large user community.
• Every problem is solved using a sequence of operators.
• Statistical analysis capabilities offered with the T-Test, ANOVA, Grouped ANOVA, and ANOVA Matrix operators.
• Textual data mining operators.
• Web-based and cloud computing capabilities.
• Visualization capabilities.
• Marketplace Extensions – especially Finance And Economics.
• Process portability.

Incentivized

• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Laptops get overheated when the tool is used from moderate to heavy use. Also, there is a lag in the tool times.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.
• Lot of scope to improve the customer support & its not upto the industry standards.

Incentivized

• Wish the tool was more efficient in terms of processing power. The tool takes a lot of CPU processing power, even for a small process on a small data set
• Wish there were more options on charts and graphs to visualize the data

Incentivized

It took my BI team one year to become productive at developing useful content on the IBM Cognos platform. After this year, the reports being developed for a client were stale and no longer relative to the ever changing needs of the business client. Given the same opportunity, I would select a platform that allows the team to quickly produce BI content. Fail fast and recover quickly!

Very fast and user-friendly tool

Incentivized

We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.

Very use to use and learn

Incentivized

Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point

Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.

Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.

Incentivized

Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.

The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us

The implementation was handled very well. The initial implementation exposed a lot of disagreement between our campuses and departments as to how we define data. This was not entirely unexpected, but I thought that we did a nice job as a team to work through some of these challenges.

Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.

Incentivized

The other product like RapidMiner Studio that I have used is WEKA. I decided to use RapidMiner because almost all modelling methods and feature selection methods from the Weka machine learning library are available within RapidMiner. Furthermore, RapidMiner Studio is a visual workflow and therefore it is easier to demonstrate and visualise the processes involves in getting the desired results. Visualization of workflow enhances teaching and learning. RapidMiner is rich with algorithms and online learning materials that can assist students in their self-directed learning on data preparation, machine learning, deep learning, text mining, and predictive analytics. Moreover, RapidMiner repository has more than 1500 machine learning algorithms and functions that students can explore for any case study and assignments. The RapidMIner is also an open platform that can seamlessly integrates with other applications programmed with other programming languages like R and Python.

Incentivized

The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.

• The platform can be pretty pricey.
• Convoluted contracts and they fine you for any breach during audits.
• Things are changed between releases without any warning and break.
• It is second to none at being able to customize list and crosstab type reports.
• You can easily set up a report to be emailed out every day and even have it export the report to a shared folder.
• On-prem environments can be scaled up pretty much as much as you would like.

Incentivized

• We saved over $100k on our direct mail program by not mailing to those unlikely to respond to our mailings based on our predictive analysis.
• Our CX team has saved countless hours by automating call scripts to isolate key phrases and code each call.

Incentivized