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as this kind of information is hard to find in the whitepapers or marketing slides. We don't compare costs of licenses here as this changes with time and really depends on the organization and at the end the total cost of implementing BusinessObjects and Cognos is really comparable.
The scheme illustrates the SAP BO tools responsible for tasks appropriate to their IBM Cognos equivalents A detailed products comparison of IBM Cognos, Business Objects and Microsoft BI can be found in the following article on our pages: Cognos and Business objects products
IBM COGNOS
Let's begin with IBM the business intelligence platform offered by the Big Blue is Cognos. There are two series 7 and 8 currently available, but the Cognos 7 although its Version 4 was introduced in 2006 - gets out-of-date (IBM claims to support Cognos Series 7 users till 2012). The first Cognos 8 software was presented in November 2005 including a few refreshed tools: Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio (in the place of former PowerPlay), Metrics Studio (instead of Metrics Manager), and Events Studio (replacing NoticeCast). The software was continuously actualized, therefore IBM quickly introduced Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. IBM advertises Cognos as a result of eighteen-years experience earned by fulfilling the demands of more than 23,000 clients, focusing on performance management and business intelligence. In the following article we analyze Cognos BI only, not Infosphere, Infosphere Warehouse (DB2) and other IBM products from the BI family.
Cognos strengths
Cognos is a complete performance management system built from the ground on a single,
purpose-prepared SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) platform.
The customers praise IBM business intelligence software for great access to all the data
completely, quickly, and accurately. The common metadata used for the complexity from users optimizes the work. Cognos simplifies consuming the once authored data. The solution offered by IBM enables easy transforming and publishing resources in different languages and formats (starting with HTML, PDF, XLS and other), and accessing them from several locations (portal, e-mail, mobile,
search, office). The interface seems user-friendly and intuitive. All the elements may be completely selfserviced the involvement of developers is not a necessity. If required, the IT developers have an easy way to deploy and manage system. IBM claims that Cognos' features are maturity, stability, and high-participation planning solution IBM offers a wide range of planning capabilities (advanced scenario modeling, plans, forecasts, budgets). Cognos system function all over the world basing on only one solution the diversification of operating countries doesn't matter as the platform works for the whole enterprise on a global scale. The analytic applications are fully compatible stored content might be quickly transformed. IBM provides Performance Management Framework, Innovation Center, BICC services, online communities, free trainings for business partners, a bunch of certifications which makes it interesting as a personal career focus.
Summarizing all highs and lows, there's one conclusion that cannot be omitted. Although IBM Cognos 8 is a great business intelligence platform, it seems to be not as independent as it should. It looks like IBM released Cognos 8 BI a bit too early. So early that definitely too much of the Series 7 was left. The common work of both 7 and 8 platforms would be an unequalled combine, but the real goal is to pack the advantages of both suites into the only one perfect-working system.
SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS
It's the right time to make a slight move to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform. We don't analyze SAP Netweaver or SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) in this article.
The first thing that may discourage potential customers of SAP is an unclear BI and PM
roadmap it's built of number of separate products basing on different technology, therefore the integration is not as good as possible. SAP BusinessObjects is repeating risk of gaining inconsistent data results the data connections should be improved due to their excess and inconsistence. multiple locations options work well but their enabling was inconsistent. Separate parts of the suite differs in the development requirements. The service of software seems embarrassing. Only a few of changes might be done personally by the customer. Most of them demand engaging the IT developers. SAP offers plenty of products responsible for financial consolidation. It's great until it comes out that the communication among them is hardened lack of migration path.
Further, the breadth is stunning but modifying the content requires complicated and laborconsuming IT lifting. The company not always realizes their promises there is a risk of lateness or even reject of foretold integration. The focus on performance management has been weak. SAP promises to head this direction in the near future. SAP claims that Business Objects is fully integrated with SAP BW and that this kind of integration doesn't require any additional IT work. Whoever tried to create a Business Objects universe based on a SAP BW Infocube knows that this is not the case. As it's clearly visible, SAP BusinessObjects software, providing effective solutions, is on a best way to the success, but the half-baked details worsen the general feeling.
COGNOS VS BO CONCLUSIONS
Both platforms IBM Cognos Series 8 and SAP BusinessObjects have specific advantages and disadvantages. Some of them are major, some only minor. But all of them influence on the usage. The answer which one is better to choose will remain undiscovered probably as long as both companies existence. New versions, additional applications, plenty of upgrades, tons of instructions and white papers all those are the details. But those are the details that really matter. As long as there's no extremely significant difference between offered platforms, just the details may decide about the fight's result. In the end, when all the possible comparisons are done, all features examined thousand times and it seems that there's really nothing to add, customers should still remember about other options - SAS, Oracle and Microsoft business intelligence solutions and the strongest rivals of both companies presented above. Nevertheless, when choosing the right business intelligence platform for your organization it might be a good idea to precisely define your needs, then talk to the technical sales people from both SAP and IBM and try to get a trial version of both platforms and test it in your business environment. This will say which platform suits the end-users best.