In the past two years, if we look at the changes that took place in the technology panorama, it is observed that Business Intelligence Reporting tools are contributing a great part in the businesses no matter whatever applications they use. These reporting tools enable a non-technical person to identify and understand the flow that takes place in the business. There are many Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools available in the market such as QlikView, Tableau, Power BI, IBM Cognos etc. Many large corporations in the world use IBM Cognos BI suite as Cognos has the capacity to perform at that scale. We shall see why Cognos is recognized as the leading BI software and a performance management tool in the IT industry.
Get To Know Cognos:
Cognos was a Canada-based company making business intelligence and performance management software till 2008. Later, it was acquired by IBM company in the same year and now the product is called as IBM Cognos BI(Business Intelligence). This reporting tool consists of web front-end with which one can create, store, prepare and access reports. It helps enterprises to perform better and Cognos BI is designed in such a way that everybody in the organization involved in decision-making can understand the software, flexible deployment option, and enable a business user to scale business analytics meet the changing organizational needs. Mindmajix is a leading provider in delivering Live instructor Led Online Cognos training.
Cognos Features:
Cognos Analytics can be used with relational and multidimensional data sources from different companies like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle etc. The below features gives you a clear understanding of what Cognos consists of:
● Ad Hoc Analysis: It is a process designed to answer a particular business question and can retrieve current data from existing report.
● Predictive Analysis: It uses a variety of sources to analyze the past and current data in order to predict future incidents.
● Online Analytical Processing (OLAP): Its dashboard provides an easy and quick way to access data from an existing report. Users can access data via a point and click interface, which saves a lot of time as compared to requesting information from another source.
● Ad Hoc Reporting: It is a process that is created by sending a request for a particular data or information. The outcome reports are then shown in the format in which the user specifies.
● Automatic Scheduled Reporting: This feature allows a user to set particular times to receive BI reports to their e-mail or any other format.
● Customizable Dashboard: This feature helps users to include specific data or information to a dashboard.
Cognos Architecture:
IBM Cognos is designed to address the challenges of company's analysis, scale reporting, event-notification and score carding. The web-based Cognos architecture was designed for availability, scalability, and openness. It is industry proven technology, platform independent and uses XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL(Web Services Definition Language. As shown in the figure, Cognos architecture is a three-tiered web architecture which consists of the below components:
● Web Server: This tier consists of one or more Cognos gateways.
● Applications: This tier contains one or more Cognos servers and the server runs requests like analysis, reports and queries forwarded by a gateway.
● Data: This includes the metric store, data sources and content store.
Cognos Benefits:
Organization can benefit in many ways by integrating business with Cognos BI analytics for generating reports.
● Lower Costs: It reduces maintenance costs due to its zero-footprint environment and complete report coverage.
● Quick Results: Reduces reporting time due to its uninterrupted integrations and adaptive authoring.
● Decision-Making Improvements: Business analysts can take a better decision-making when data presentation is clear and easy to understand. Cognos' dashboard delivers reports in such a way that data presented would be clear and easy to analyze.
● Automatic Adjustments: Adaptive authoring adjusts report layout automatically when objects are moved, added or removed.
● Usage of Variety Charts: It has the ability to use different charts such as pie, crosstabs, 3D bar, line, funnel, gauge, scatter, dot density, waterfall and so on.
● Multi-Page Layouts: It can create complex and multi-page layouts using variety data sources.
● Performance: Shows high-performance data accessibility crossover all the sources.
● Connectivity: Provides complete connectivity listless of the environment.
● Multilingual: It is designed with multilingual capabilities. Delivering of reports will be automatically in users working language.
Apart from the above-mentioned advantages there are many internal benefits of the tool and can be understood in the real-time scenario.
List Of Companies Using Cognos:
There are around 26,800 companies using Cognos in 23 different industries across the world. Few top notch companies in the list - IBM, Covidien LP, Concur Technologies, Magellan Health Services, Suncorp and so forth. Cross-section of Industries such as Defense, Aerospace, Banking, Hospitals, Education, Health Care, Energy sector etc use Cognos in their businesses and are successfully performing with changing business needs.
Here is a small graphical representation of job profiles and salaries related to Cognos which may urge an aspirant looking for Cognos BI. There is good demand for all job profiles of IBM Cognos across the world
Conclusion:
IBM Cognos provide a full spectrum of analysis right from analytical reporting to predictive analysis and supports all the analysis needs of an organization. This tool allows business users to organize and access data optimally from various sources to provide a master plan for complete analysis.