IBM Cognos Analytics

Score7 out of 10

584 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.

Screenshot of AI-generated insights and forecasts that can be added with just a click of a button.

Screenshot of a dashboard that can be generated automatically using IBM Cognos Analytics by uploading or selecting data.

Screenshot of an AI-generated dashboard from a spreadsheet that was just uploaded. This offers a great starting point for the creative process.

Screenshot of where to import data to IBM Cognos Analytics from CSV files and spreadsheets. Users can connect to cloud or on-premises data sources, including SQL databases, Google BigQuery, Amazon, and Redshift.

Screenshot of a sample operational dashboard of a coffee shop created using IBM Cognos Analytics.

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Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.

Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Category average: 7.9
Report Versioning
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
Category average: 8.4
Javascript API
A Javascript API is a type of API
Category average: 8.3

Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Category average: 7.6
Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Category average: 7.8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
Category average: 8.3

Muneeb Khan

Business Intelligence Developer in Information Technology at American Iron & Metal (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics is used as a reporting tool to make reports and schedule them. We have over 250 reports that are scheduled daily and weekly to over 20 executives. IBM Cognos Analytics was initially decided to be used as an automatic scheduler of excel format reports. Later on it was adopted to be used as our dashboarding platform.

Pros

Schedule reports
Calculations and transformation of raw data
Flexibility with excel format

Cons

Write back functionality
Visual Data Modelling
Native connectivity with latest cloud platforms

Return on Investment

Time Savings & Productivity Gains
Consistent, governed data models reduce the risk of errors
Report bursting ensures store managers, regional leaders, and executives each receive tailored reports automatically
On-prem IBM Cognos Analytics environments require heavy IT effort to maintain servers

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Cloud and Sigma Computing

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Microsoft Power BI, Sigma Computing, ThoughtSpot

Shivanand Labbi

Senior software engineer in Information Technology at Manhattan (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We work for supply chain domain industry and IBM Cognos Analytics is integrated with our organization product warehouse management the primary usage of this tool is for generating the reports based on the warehouse data stored in database also helps in analysing data for various purpose in warehouse management , It provides easy reporting and powerful analysis also with smooth integration across multiple data sources also it has very user-friendly interface.

Pros

Reports Generation and auto scheduling part
Data analysis is good feature
It has various font support helps in Ware house for ex it supports barcodes and all
Load balancing feature and auto healing

Cons

Application breaks for no reason many times and fix is only restart.
Customer service is poor is what I felt
Interface looks outdated that needs and impovement
LDAP logins gives error multiple times for example integration with Azure login makes trouble

Return on Investment

Strong data analysis capabilities helps for business planning
Great reporting capacity helps to update all the leadership management about the business in one report
Auto scheduling and report generation is good feature which saves lot of time.

Alternatives Considered

Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)

Other Software Used

PagerDuty, Salesforce CMS, Docker, IBM webMethods, Nagios XI

Raj Shrivastwa

Salesforce Data Analyst in Quality Assurance at Arcserve (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

During 2023-2024, we used IBM Cognos Analytics for building detailed report from the complex data. Biggest virtue of this platform was it's AI assistant chat bot which you wouldn't find in Power BI back in the day.

The reports that we built were more on the operations risk metrics between potential sales vs closed sales. We thoroughly built more complex data-based reports on commission and AP regional spend management.

Pros

The AI chatbot was biggest highlight, it has a serious way of reading enormous data set. Making us bit more focused on the end user needs, and generating reports and dashboards.
The data modelling feature was flexible, we had more features similar to power bi like creating joins, prompts etc. It also featured multi data sources connector; however we didn't test unstructured data sources.
The forecasting analytics were off the charts; I liked it a lot even more than power bi.

Cons

The cloud reporting was slow, which was expected considering the large ERP data sets we used to import.
The initial setup is quite long, can test your patience.
The expensive cost for mid-sized organizations, hoping they offer more lite based plan in future.

Return on Investment

The cloud version was slow time we used it, and it made load report slower to management folks. Thus, adding some negativity to the decision-making process.
The cost was same as power bi pro which was $10.00, we were around 6 folks who grabbed license for IBM Cognos Analytics tool. Our main motive was to decrease our burden from power bi reporting.
While things were smooth, until in May 2024 our organization did restructuring and cancelled the subscription license in order to reduce cost. So, if you want to use IBM Cognos Analytics, better don't use another BI tool or vice versa

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Looker Studio, Microsoft Power BI

Aafaq Sikandar

Founder & CEO in Corporate at ENCYPHERS (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics is deeply integrated into our daily reporting and decision-making and I use IBM Cognos Analytics mainly for data visualization and analytics in my role as controller for finance and IT at LMW Limited.

Pros

IBM Cognos Analytics dashboards are simple to use and make data exploration a whole lot easier.
A non-technical person with clean data can build a dashboard with almost no experience.
Drag-and-drop capability simplifies chart generation and even complicated dashboards are simple to explore and customize.

Cons

For new comers, the learning curve is steep.
There is a slight lag with the cloud version.

Return on Investment

IBM Cognos Analytics has made it much easier for me to deal with huge amounts of data.
It is great, as it saves me time, cause I can make decisions faster.

Other Software Used

Vasion Print, IBM AIOps Insights, Miro

Ranjit R Puthenpuramodyil View profile

Principal at Toshiba (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Cognos Analytics as part of various leadership reports and insights. The business problem we address is how effective our inventory is flowing and what inventory is in more demand and which location.

Pros

Data Cleansing
Visual Graphs
Predictive Analytics

Cons

Performance
GenAI based SQL instructions

Return on Investment

Time Savings
KPI reporting

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop and Powerbird

Other Software Used

IBM Sterling Order Management, IBM Maximo Application Suite, IBM Watson Content Analytics

IBM Cognos Analytics

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Key Features

Top Performing Features

Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Report Versioning

Javascript API

Areas for Improvement

Pattern Recognition and Data Mining

Predictive Analytics

Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)

Reviews

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