Cognos Analytics - Overview

Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence is a web-based integrated business intelligence suite by IBM®. It offers variety of toolset for reporting, analytics, scorecarding, and monitoring of events and metrics.
Cognos has data modeling component like Framework Manager, Cube Designer, and Transformer. From ReportNet a desktop tool to Cognos Analytics 11.x , this BI platform has evolved into a robust data exploration, standard business reporting and instant ad hoc analysis tool. For consumers and report authors Cognos provides easy to use interface with drag and drop functionality.

Cognos reporting platform has following components :

• Report Suite : The most robust tool Cognos offers for creating BI reports. It has funcitonality to design reports using pre-built reporting metadata , however custom SQL feature makes it flexible enough to embed SQLs directly into the report. It comes along with default visualizations and also has backward compatibility to previous versions of Report Studio tool. Easy drag ans drop feature on data points, you can also perform JOIN, UNION, EXCEPT opertations from this interface.
• Dashboard & Stories : IBM® Cognos® Analytics provides dashboards and stories to communicate your insights and analysis. You can assemble a view that contains visualizations such as a graph, chart, plot, table, map, or any other visual representation of data.
• Data Module : Data modules can be based on data servers, packages, uploaded files, data sets, and other data modules. You can combine multiple, different types of sources into one data module.
• Event Studio : Personally, I feel Event Suite the most robust scheduling tool provided by any BI application in rhe market, not only you can schedule jobs and reports , but you can trigger it based on load completion or any business KPI change.
• File Upload : Works best for POCs on data analytics, since users can upload a sample spreadsheet dataset and analyze using Data Modules features and dashbaords.
• Activities and Schedules : This capability lets you look holisitically at your overall schedules and check its histroical runs , current statuses and upcoming schedules.
• Cube Designer : Similar to Transformers application in Cognos, Cube Designer is an online tool which analytics team can use to create DMR drill up - drill down data model. Its also faster retrieval for data unlike conventional reporting packages built using Cognos Framework.

It’s Window based components :

• Framework Manager : Dimensional Modeling tool to create reporting packages for consumption by reporting suites within Cognos. It is a window based tool and is considered most robust modeling tool to build a star schema or snowflake structure with compatability to most of the datasources offered by Industries.
• Transformer : Prior to introducing Cube Designer , Tranformer tool was/is used for DMR models with Cube functionality with drill-up,drill-down capability for reporting.

Cognos Vs Other BI Tools

Cognos even though considered one of the earliest pioneers in the field of BI reporting has faced tough competition now as more companies are entering into building BI application. Tableau , Power BI , Qlik View, Google Analytics, and Thoughspot are some of the leading technologies competing with Cognos.

The most important question one needs answered is which tool is the best amongst the pack? Answer is not quiet simple. Depending on your business need your company might prefer one than the other, or if corporate budget permits then enterprise analytics team can buy more than one BI tools to serve the need for different business scenarios. I would higlight key comparisons between these applications and where Cognos still has an edge, and where it lacks compared to its competitors. That probably would be topic for another day, comparing BI Applications with respect to Gartner Magic Quadrant

Conclusion

IBM Cognos Analytics is amongst top niche players in BI realm as per Gartner. Continuing to push boundaries and trying to make its way to Leader Board. It has a solid framework around for reporting and analytics however in the past lagged big data integration and compatibility with some of the cloud data sources in earlier versions. Now with 11.1.x version its slowly trying to catch up with Tableau , Power BI and ThoughtSpot application. Version 11.1.x ] offers embedding REST APIs, it also has capability to integrate Jupyter Notebook representing Python as one of the supported platforms. Cognos has slowly started attracting data scientisits, some consider Cognos as a serious contender amongst existing reporting tools that offer robust data engineering and data science analytics platform.