Cognos Questions

[BlackDuck]

Hi All,

Let me first apologise where I have placed this as I could not find a suitable category for this discussion.

I have a presentation and I have chosen the topic of why do businesses choose Cognos over Microsoft these days. I am a big fan of both Cognos and Microsoft (..more of iOS developer  ;) ) and so when I am place at a client's site to implement a project, I am not fuss what technology is being used.

What I am now struggling to understand, mostly with the current client is what advantages do Cognos BI offer that Microsoft BI can't deliver? Off the cuff these would be my initial thoughts:

Thin-Client Slicing and Dicing
Cognos Analysis Studio is a beautiful tool and when you release a cube for a business to slice and dice, that is where they get all excited. What does Microsoft BI offer these days that challenge this tool? SharePoint with PowerPivot?

End Product
Leading from the above, with the current client, their requirement is to be able to slice and dice but with the goal to export the result to Excel to pretty up report. As a BI consultant, I die a little everytime I hear this because my main purpose is to eliminate these processes and help streamline these results. So my point is, if you are going to slice and dice but dump into Excel, why not just do it all there? Has anyone been lucky enough to determine the limitations doing this in Excel (PowerPivot) vs Analysis Studio?

Cost
One of the main agruments is the licencing cost for implementing and running Cognos BI verus Microsoft BI. I find that a number of my clients (100%) already have a licence for Microsoft SQL Server which is only used for their Content Store or/and Data Warehouse. Can anyone provide me with some substantial costs for both Cognos and Microsoft for a simple scenario or point me to a case study.

Report Studio vs. SSRS
This is no brainer. I believe now there is nothing that SSRS cannot replicate. I would love to hear otherwise.

Transformer vs. Analysis Services
My understanding is that Transformer tool has not undergo that many changes since 7.x. Cognos BI 8, and now 10 has been release and Transformer is pretty much the same. My question is, is this true? Can anyone tell me why there has been little movement in this area. From what I have experience, back in 7.x this product ROCK! But now, I finding that processing a Transform cube is far slower than the same developed in Microsoft Analysis Services. Even though there is a bigger learning curve with the Microsoft tool. What are others preferences and experiences and why? Developing a cube in Analysis Services gives me more ability to shows attributes compared to the inability with Transformer.

Adhoc Reporting
For a business, it is ideal to be able to give their business users the ability to create their own reports without the dependency of having to wait for a report writer to create it. To facilitate this, a tool must be dumb down enough to ensure a small learning curve, reliable data source and ability to share this report.

Report Builder (Microsoft) and Business Insight? I take it Report Express is no longer? Again, Report Builder is already included in the Microsoft BI suite (for free) but extra licensing cost is associated with using Business Insight, no?

Content Management
Cognos Connection vs SSRS (Report Server) are pretty much close in regarding to securing, sharing, scheduling etc. I find maybe that as an Admin, you may have less control. Unless someone knows, but in Cognos Connection I can manage the scheduling of a report where in SSRS, I got to figure out the GUID for the report subscription and then go into MSMS and find the SQL Job....

Deploying from environment to environment - in Cognos Connection I can create a deployment package and maintain a folder structure where in Report Studio I can only deploy to one folder and have to move reports around, maybe still the same in 2010 and 2012?

Culture Change
I think the most improve concern a CIO needs to make is upsetting the balance. Can anyone provide insight where someone has moved to Microsoft BI and it just did not work out. From my POV, I can only see the web base slice and dice is Cognos major perk? But weighing this against what Microsoft BI can offer these days vs cost, I am finding it difficult to see why organisations stay loyal to Cognos BI

Certification Path
From what I can see, to prepare for certification for both Cognos BI or Microsoft BI, you need to either:

• Attend a instructor-led course
• On-line training

or the major difference is Microsoft has self-training kits that focus on what you need to learn for the certification exam, but for Cognos...you have to read guides that contain EVERYTHING or EVERY scenarios that are not even captured in the exam. Am I correct saying this?

Contractor Market
Ongoing support, what does a business have out there. There is no doubt there is way more people out there that can do the Microsoft BI work but it is getting harder and harder to find Cognos BI Developers. They know this and ensure that they are more available for contracting roles which ensures they are prices between $75AUD to $150AUD per hour + super. Those not in contracting roles are either locked away in a coshie permanently roles or holidaying from their last contract role  ;D

Out of the Box
I may have used the wrong term but Microsoft BI offers loads of tools that are included in the Microsoft BI suite where with Cognos BI you need to pay through the nose. How is this helping Cognos?


Phew!

[blom0344]

I am quite sure MS BI can achieve loads of stuff especially if you are prepared to program the finer pieces. I am ready to believe MS cubes can compete with Cognos dimensional equipment, but there is no way it offers out-of-box functionality like Report Studio does.  If you believe otherwise, then you have obviously never worked with it.

The biggest issue with MS BI is the lack of a good metadata layer. The advantages here are what makes or breaks a premium BI-tool: the ability the handle out-of-the-box multifact / multigrain scenario's. The last MS BI developer I spoke with didn't even have a clue where I was talking about

[RobsWalker68]

Hi,

It looks like in SQL Server 2012 they have now got around to adding a meta data layer as this was a major down point.

To me, Microsoft BI makes perfect sense as an option if you already have SQL Server, however if you are in an environment where your major database systems are something other, such as Oracle or DB2, then would you buy another database solution just to use the reporting tools?

Rgds

Rob 

[CognosPaul]

I speak as a developer - not a user. Going through your list so the following may seem a bit stream-of-consciousness

IBM's seems to be geared towards giving users the ability to blend reports and studios. Go Office and Business Insight allows users to drag in objects from different reports to build the spreadsheet/dashboard that the user wants, without having to rely on a BI department.

Go Office, unlike Power Pivot, will connect to any package or datasource through Cognos. This means that any security restraints are handled through Cognos. The only configuration is the initial install on the user's computer, adding new data sources is not an issue at all.

One of the advantages of Analysis Studio over Power Pivot is the ability to create jobs for the reports. It's easy enough to open excel and hit F9, but it's even easier to open the report in Outlook (or on your phone, or on your ipad, or wherever).

Cognos is expensive - no argument.

From my (admittedly limited) experience with SSRS, it's little more than a toy when compared to RS. Prompts are limiting, master/detail relationships are difficult to set exactly the way you want, MDX needs to be hand written and doesn't allow for extremely efficient queries. I'd say that anything you can do in SSRS can be replicated in RS.

Analysis Services will always win against Transformer. It's exactly the opposite situation of SSRS to RS. Transformer is a toy; slow data retrieval, poor support for calculated members/sets, limited MDX functionality and an inability to add more attributes. Of course, a cube will always be easier to work with than a relational data source, even if it is a powercube.

There are a number of third party tools that make content management in Cognos significantly easier. You shouldn't promote reports from one environment to another with report studio anyway. In my opinion report studio should be disabled in a production environment.

A lot IBM partners make a great deal of money off Cognos courses. It may be difficult to make the move to opening up the training material.

I'm in the wrong country. 150AUD? Seriously? Drop me a PM and I'll arrange remote consultancy for 100. Wow. People here are complaining bitterly about (roughly) 65 AUD.

In the end you get what you pay for. The Microsoft database suite is a good one, but not as good as Oracle's. The price difference reflects that. The Microsoft reporting suite is the same way; it's good, but not as good as Cognos.