Cognos – Product Review

Check out this Cognos review and see if this data analytics platform is the right one for you.

Making use of the massive amounts of data that are flooding your company is one of the challenges. The goal of business intelligence has always been to make better use of data, which is what Business Intelligence (BI) platforms do. They gather and process data more efficiently, assisting businesses in understanding and visualizing data that will serve as the foundation for determining the company’s strategy and making informed decisions.

Data management and understanding are aided by BI platforms. According to Forbes, 95% of businesses struggle with unstructured data management. Another finding from DataProt is that businesses that use BI platforms make decisions five times faster than those that do not.

In this article, we’ll look at Cognos, one of the best BI tools on the market.

What is Cognos?

Cognos is an IBM web-based platform that provides many business intelligence features such as reports, analytics, dashboards, strategy management, and many more. It is intended to assist users in making informed and insightful decisions in less time and with greater accuracy.

This is ideal for businesses looking for a system that will empower them with data-driven decisions and self-service features that allow them to use and configure dashboards for better visualization and reports.

IBM Cognos provides a scalable platform that can be installed on-premises or in the cloud. It provides a wide range of analysis tools, such as trend analysis, what-if analysis, and many others, to provide more accurate results.

Cognos has the following basic components:

  • Query Studio: This is used to create simple queries and business questions via service reports.
  • Cognos Connection:  This ensures that all functions are included in the suite.
  • Report Studio: This is where graphs, charts, and lists are created.
  • Event Studio: This is used to notify enterprise events in real-time.
  • Analysis Studio:  This is a collection of On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations used to extract or retrieve data for analysis, detect anomalies, and more.

What is the general problem that Cognos can solve?

Cognos enables businesses or users to build interactive dashboards that aid in making informed decisions and forecasting market changes. The software was created in such a way that businesses will find it easier to extract data, analyze it, and generate reports.

Today, this platform is critical for making business decisions, and the following are some problems that it can solve:

  • Manual tasks take more time, require more effort, and are more prone to error. Cognos uses its built-in intelligence system to automate data preparation and processing.
  • Cognos uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to forecast future market changes and create effective dashboards.
  • Cognos employs Natural Language powered AI, which extracts information and makes predictions from raw text.
  • Cognos enables the creation of interactive dashboards in a variety of formats that are tailored to specific business requirements. It enables users to present and analyze charts in the manner of their choice.

What makes it different from competing products?

IBM Cognos makes it easier to use its self-service features by allowing users to view and interact with reports on their mobile devices even when they are not in the office or offline. This BI platform also includes social networking tools that make team collaboration much easier, allowing businesses to maximize the capabilities of their members.

IBM Cognos is built on a solid data science foundation and is backed up by heavy-duty analytics. It combines a multitude of third-party products that make work much more efficient, such as relational databases. Its key feature is its highly interactive platform, which makes creating dashboards and reports easier.

Are you finding this Cognos review informative so far? Keep on reading…

Who is the product for?

IBM Cognos is designed to assist businesses in understanding their data. This platform can be used by anyone in the organization to create business reports, analyze data, create dashboards, and manage and monitor events.

Cognos is used as a BI platform by over 23,000 leading organizations, the majority of which are in the manufacturing sector, followed by the retail sector. Michigan State University, BMW Financial Services, Troy Corporation, and others are among their customers.

Integrations

IBM Cognos Connection comes with the IBM Cognos BI platform. This serves as a single point of access to the organization’s data for organizing, analyzing, and querying, as well as creating reports and events. Users of IBM Cognos BI applications can access it via the IBM Cognos Connection, which can also be integrated with other BI and web-based applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Full feature Business Intelligence Package
  • Customizable interactive dashboards
  • Allows data transformation
  • Sandbox/test environments are supported
  • Allows for the creation of shortcuts
  • Multiple report formats are supported
  • Active reports can be transported
  • Accessible even if offline
  • Provides in-depth insights
  • Self-service analytics
  • Security

Cons

  • Active report files may become very large
  • Auto modeling
  • High enterprise pricing
  • Limited geographical reporting options, such as map creation

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Pricing

Cognos offers several pricing models:

  • Standard (Cloud): $15 per user per month

The Standard plan enables users to build powerful dashboards and animated stories, capture and share visuals, connect to and upload to data storage, and receive automated version updates. This is hosted by IBM and allows for plain language data exploration.

  • Plus (Cloud): $35 per user per month

The Plus plan includes all of the features found in the Standard plan, as well as the ability to detect patterns, and anomalies, and perform predictive analysis.

  • Premium (Cloud): $70 per user per month

The premium plan includes all of the features of the Plus plan as well as the ability to create pixel-perfect reports.

  • Enterprise: Custom

The Enterprise plan or highest tier includes all of the Premium plan’s features, supports control access based on designated roles, can be hosted on the IBM Cloud or your infrastructure, and has a dedicated single tenant. This tier is dedicated to meeting your company’s critical performance requirements.

Conclusion

Cognos is a powerful BI tool that empowers its users with self-service capabilities powered by AI to accelerate data preparation, management, analysis, and report creation to gain deep insights and make informed decisions. This is an excellent web-based platform that can also be accessed offline via another computer or mobile device, providing users with a seamless, consistent, effective, and efficient service.

This will undoubtedly assist you in taking your business to the next level with more effective strategies and data insights.

We hope you found this Cognos review helpful.


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