IBM Cognos Analytics vs. OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting

IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation

Incentivized

iHub is a decent enough environment that it serves our needs. We can have unlimited users and it can tie into AD although we do not use that feature currently. It is a decent place to store all of the reports in one location, even though for us it is not visually appealing to the end users. iHub is not a place where you want to create robust/interactive dashboards for end users to drill through and follow a "story".

Incentivized

• We can make dozens of dispatchers all focusing on different types of workloads.
• Friendly user interface, without the need for coding or complicated editing.
• Highly functionality reporting tools.
• We can easily create trigger when a certain threshold are met sending reports or alerts to needed parties.

Incentivized

• It is fairly easy to set the sharing rules for a report/dashboard.
• They have a decent amount of time frame options for setting a schedule to generate a report.
• The support is mostly helpful and timely if you have an issue.

Incentivized

• IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
• Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.

Incentivized

• Setting up a "dashboard" is extremely lacking in functionality. The different chart widgets you place on the page do not interact with each other. When you select an item from one do not expect it to highlight or filter another.
• The speed and stability are not great, but maybe that is just our environment not being up to snuff...even though we are above the "recommended" settings.
• The main GUI for a user is TERRIBLE. You log into a File Tree format where you have to navigate folders to reach the correct dashboard. There are ways around this, but it would either require an expensive payment to the Professional Services team to revamp to UI or another option they gave us was to create the "Default Dashboard" and provide that link to users and in that Dashboard, you use a new tab to include the navigation back to the main screen so that at least on the initial load the user is taken to a friendly looking dashboard instead of a file tree.

Incentivized

For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.

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.

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

Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.

My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.

Incentivized

Our instance of iHub does not stack up against the other larger BI tools out today. It is a good place to store reports in a central location that allows users to run very specific reports on demand, but it is not a place I would want to store all of my "dashboards". As far as holding individual reports that are specific to an individual need, it is a great tool. If you want to create a report that will be used as a Template for a Form or a Label, iHub is a good choice to store and schedule the report or call it via API to generate it and return it to your calling app.

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.

• We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios.
• Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis.
• Has mobile application which works seamless.
• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.

Incentivized