IBM Cognos Insight

[MFGF]

It's New! It's Hot! It's Here! Not to be confused with IBM Cognos Business Insight. Nor with IBM Cognos Consumer Insight. This is the new desktop offering from IBM Cognos, and you can download it now.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24031042

[Lynn]

Is it possible that a good thesaurus is not available to anyone in the product development group at IBM? What other possible explanation could there be for naming this tool something that can be so easily confused with other existing tools???

I did a quick search and find these synonyms for insight:

acumen, comprehension, discernment, divination, intuition, judgment, observation, penetration, perception, perceptivity, perspicacity, sagaciousness, sagacity, sageness, sapience, shrewdness, understanding, vision, wavelength, wisdom

Personally I think IBM Cognos Perspicacity would be a vastly superior name!!
:o

[MFGF]

Absolutely hilarious!!!  ;D ;D

At least it isn't another Manager... Or Studio :) I guess IBM couldn't choose between them for this one, so went for the other safe option.

I will be giggling about this all night :)

[Grim]

In case folks, like me, were wondering what it is....

From the docs:
With IBM Cognos Insight, you can analyze data, explore scenarios, and influence decisions by creating managed workspaces. Use these interactive workspaces to communicate results to managers. Because Cognos Insight supports write-back, you can also use these workspaces to gather and consolidate management targets, commitments, and forecasts.

[charon]

hm....i dont know yet if i like the decision of turnig insight into a desktop programm and not a web client :S
is it true that the tm1 engine is behind that?

looks nice, i have to say  :P

[CognosPaul]

Depending on the implementation, client side exploratory tools can provide substantial performance increase over a web-based system. Instead of calling the database for each action, the tool can work against a local subset of the data providing near instantaneous results. Client side tools could also make data exploration much more effective. SAS JMP is great for data exploration and I'd love to see a Cognos tool that could provide the same capabilities.

[MFGF]

It is true that the TM1 engine is under the covers, yes. A user can work locally with data brought in from excel, csv, Cognos reports, ODBC etc, then share their work with others, or even publish it up to the enterprise TM1/C10 BI environment as a package and report set. It's a nice friendly UI, and is great for local reporting and what if/scenario modelling.

Anyone with an existing Advanced Business Author license can use it, or alternatively there is a specific client-only license too I think.

Cheers!

MF.

[mgibson]

I've been playing with this new tool a little bit (I first heard about it a few months ago and have been waiting to see it), and considering it is supposed to compete with the 'new breed' of BI / Visualisation tools such as Tableau, it falls well short.  Especially seeing the number of visualisations is quite small - much less than competitors.

I understand that it is new (but based on TM1), so we should not expect it to reach the heights set by tools that have existed for years, but I'm still disappointed.

I hope successive versions are not too far away and include significant additions.

I also think that being based on TM1 brings some baggage in the definition of dimensions - but you can simply 'import' data.

The (limited) integration with Cognos BI is a good feature however.

Regards
Mick

[MFGF]

Who told you it was supposed to compete with Tableau? That's certainly not how it's being positioned. If you hear anyone at IBM tell you it does, report them to the IBM Truth Police :)

Yes it gives you visualisations, but they are only the (limited) set from TM1. The real benefit is being able to publish to the Enterprise (in my humble opinion).

Cheers!

MF.


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[CognosPaul]

I'm not familiar with Tableau, but I would love a product that competes with JMP. I've seen a grand total of one live JMP demo and I was completely blown away.

One of these days I'll get my hand on a license and figure out a way to jam Cognos into it. I'll call it JoMPnos. Or CoJUMP.

[cognostechie]

I don't have this product but I would love to know why it will be limited to only using TM1 as the source? How does it use TM1? If it used the TM1 package from the portal, why can't you use another package? Ofcourse, the write-back capability would not be there without TM1 but can't you still use it for data exploration. The write-back is not required in every scenario.

[charon]

True, i totaly agree  :P

[MFGF]

You can use multiple sources - text files, excel worksheets, ODBC connections, Cognos 10 reports etc to feed data into Insight - it doesn't limit you to just using data already stored in an Enterprise TM1 cube. The technology under the covers of Insight is the TM1 engine, so you get fast response times, write back capabilities, what-if/scenario modelling capabilities etc, plus the ability to publish your data and reports up to the enterprise.

Cheers!

MF.


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[cognostechie]

Me and my impatient ways..

I didn't read your previous post completely. You did mention that it can read data from those sources.

but when you say it uses TM1 technology behind the scenes, what would that mean? If it can read data from various sources, then it uses various technologies, correct? Is TM1 one of those?

[MFGF]

The data is read into Insight and assembled into a local TM1 cube in memory on the client machine. It is largely irrelevant where the data is sourced from.

Cheers!

MF.


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[cognostechie]

so if I have a report that is using FM as the source and the report is very slow..

I run the report in Insight, it reads the data from the database at that point, then stores the data locally
on a TM1 cube.. is that what it does? and then the 2nd time anybody runs the report with different parameters then it fetches the data from that local TM1 cube.. is that what it does?

[MFGF]

Just to clarify... Insight is essentially a personal reporting/exploration tool. The TM1 cube exists in memory on your local machine. If you source it from a report on your Cognos server which takes a while to run, it simply means your local cube will take a while to build. Thereafter you are working with the data in your local cube (unless you decide to re-build it, in which case the source report will need to re-run). At this point, "others" have no access to your cube - it exists only on your local machine.

If you decide to publish it to the enterprise, it becomes a TM1 server on your centrally installed TM1 instance. You can also publish a C10 package, data source and reports. Others can then potentially use these.

Hope this helps!

MF.


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[cognostechie]

Excellent !

I would love to see this product. Will get it soon. Apart from the customers big TM1 licences, Cognos Express users can use it too.

[MFGF]

Not with the current released version of Express. They will need to wait for the next release I guess. :)

MF.