Introduction:
Cognos is a web-based business intelligence suite that has been introduced by IBM. It is an effective suite that provides toolset for a variety of purpose. This includes reporting, scorecarding, analytics, and even monitoring of events and metrics. Cognos comprises of many components that have been designed with the aim to meet different information relevant requirements of a company.
Is IBM Cognos free?
If you want to take a look at how Cognos work then yes you can sign up for a free trial today. With this 30-day free trial, you can learn to make your data work with IBM Cognos analytics. Note that, up to 5 users can easily join the same trial.
Use of IBM Cognos:
Anyone relevant to this Business Intelligence field can use IBM Cognos. There are a number of organizations that are continuously using IBM Cognos for viewing and creating business reports and analyzing and monitoring events and metrics. Now why are they using Cognos? Well it is to help them make not only effective but result-oriented business decisions. You might also be interested in comparison between Cognos and Tableau.
IBM Cognos statistics:
Did you know, IBM Cognos target is mostly large corporation and mid-sized companies.
According to our research, there are 35,006 companies that are actively using IBM Cognos. Among this number, majority of the companies are located in the United States. With that, the other companies are from the Computer Software industry.
Cognos is mostly used by such organizations that either have employees from 50-200 or they generate a revenue of 1M to 10M dollars.
Best Cognos Analytics Training Classes:
What programming language does Cognos use?
If you ever got the chance to install Cognos or even check its directory structure then you’d get to know it requires the Java RunTime Environment (JRE) to function properly.
Pros and Cons of using IBM Cognos as BI tool
In this section we shall take a look at both pros and cons of this highly demanding BI tool.
Pros:
It helps to create active reports that are transportable:
It means that the created reports can be easily emailed and stored on jump drives. With that, these reports can also be saved to shared areas of any file system.
The active reports created are great for offline consumption:
With Cognos, the active reports can even be executed while you are not present in the office. This helps the field employees to access data even if they don’t have an internet connection. And thus this is how Cognos enables field employees to work easily in remote locations like airplanes etc.
Cognos active reports can easily work with iPads:
As we all know the use of iPad is often synonymous and executives prefer to use this device instead of any other. And Cognos can easily work with iPads thereby giving executives or any other employee the freedom to work with whatever the device they’re comfortable with.
The reports created by Cognos are flashy:
Cognos create flashy reports which are more likely to be consumed by the organization than the basic information. Check out the IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate.
Cons:
The active files can become very large in size:
Even though active files created by Cognos have its perk but at some point these files can become very large and then they’d bog your e-mail servers.
Very expensive:
The total cost of ownership can be a little expensive as compared to other tools. If you have more employees then yes, cognos can be pricey.
Can’t work properly with large data sets:
The large data sets that have so many parameters, Cognos cannot work with them smoothly.
Compatibility problem:
The cross-browser compatibility with Cognos is often very problematic.
Tableau vs Cognos:
In this section, we shall make a small comparison between Tableau and Cognos.
Tableau:
Tableau as we all know is a business intelligence tool that offers a variety of features like
Graphic benchmark tools
Highlighting and filtration of data
Offering customizable dashboards
And much more.
Cognos:
Cognos is a BI tool offered by IBM that also offers a variety of features that differ from Tableau. It offers:
An intuitive interface.
Scheduling and alerts option.
Personalized experience offered both online and offline.
Smart search works.
And many other.
Tableau-Target market:
The target market of tableau is usually small, medium, and large enterprises.
Cognos-Target market:
Whereas the target market of Cognos is users from medium and large-scale organizations.
Tableau-Pricing:
Tableau has different versions, some are paid and some are available for free.
Cognos-Pricing:
Cognos offers a free 30-day trial after that you have to pay a certain amount to enjoy its features.
If you want to read more about Tableau vs Cognos then click here.
Conclusion:
When it comes to IBM Cognos, there are endless features offered. Organizations whether medium or large can easily use this BI tool by IBM to help make better business decisions. Therefore, take a look at this overview of IBM Cognos BI tool and never stop learning.