We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
"Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."
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"The solution's support could be better."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
"They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
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IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Oracle Essbase and Looker. See our IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
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