Introduction to IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

One of the few things that i have been doing in the last 3 weeks is in finding a good research topic for my part-time PhD thesis. Actually it is a Weekend PhD as i work during the weekdays and in the weekends devote some time to the PhD. Its a bit tiresome but due to my ever so considerate wife, have been able to do it well so far. As part of the research work, i have been looking at how all the reporting tools out there in the Market fare against Oracle's BI stack in terms of features, functionality, products and upgrades. Also, it is a refreshing change to move away from BI EE Answers/Dashboards if only for a couple of weekends :-). So far i have managed to work with 3 toolsets.

1. Pentaho - Open Source BI (including the Mondrian OLAP server)
2. Jaspersoft - Open Source BI
3. Cognos 8 BI Express

I will reserve my observations on Pentaho & Jaspersoft to a later date. Today i will just focus on IBM's Cognos 8 Express BI product stack. I was very keen on actually installing Cognos 8 due to the fact that Cognos was the first BI product i ever worked with. My experience dates nearly 6-7 years back when i started out on a project implementing Cognos 7.3. Those were the days when most BI tools primarily had a client-server architecture with desktop tools dominating the market. Cognos 7.3 was no different and in fact Cognos Impromptu & Powerplay were pretty famous even back then. Immediately after that i joined Oracle and i started focusing on Oracle BI.

Cognos 7.3 was based on a client server architecture. Cognos Impromptu was the relational reporting tool and Powerplay Transformer was the MOLAP engine of Cognos. After the 7.3 release, i believe Cognos rewrote the code for their entire software and came out with another release called Reportnet. Reportnet was the first product suite from Cognos that enabled creating reports over the web. Powerplay Transformer was a very robust MOLAP engine even back then. If i remember correctly, one of its advantages was it built MOLAP cubes pretty fast(for reasonably big datasets) and was considered a competitor to the Essbase dominated MOLAP market. It had a very good intuitive UI as well. But after the IBM acquisition(i am not sure whether this happened after Applix acquisition by Cognos), Powerplay is no more the strategic OLAP product. This has been superceded by TM1 which is more suited for Planning & Performance Management( again i am guessing this based on documents i see on the web, TM1 seems to have superceded Powerplay transformer). But Powerplay still does exist as part of Cognos 8 BI platform and the web client of Powerplay is now called as Analysis Studio (it looks like they have built a new UI which has the same features as Powerplay desktop client) but with support for Powerplay and TM1

From an architecture standpoint, Cognos 8 has the following products

1. Cognos Connection - This is the content publishing interface for Cognos. This looks to be a modified version of the older powerplay web server. In short this is the dashboard interface of Cognos. This is where it gets a bit confusing. Cognos also has another product called GO! Dashboard which is supposed to do dashboarding as well. I am not commenting on it as i do not have it installed.
2. Cognos Administrator - This is for managing all the content over the web. Security, Portlets etc are all managed from here.
3. Cognos Query Studio - This is very similar to BI Answers. One can create reports on the fly using this.
4. Cognos Reports Studio - This is very similar to BI Publisher for creating pixel perfect reports. But it supports multi-dimensional sources as well.
5. Cognos Framework Manager - This is very similar to BI EE Repository Administrator.
6. Cognos Analysis Studio - Roughly translates to Answers Plus interface intended for 11g BI EE. But is pretty good. As far as i understand it does support only multi-dimensional sources like PowerPlay Transformer Cubes, TM1 etc. No support for relational sources.
7. Cognos Metrics Studio - This is the scorecarding interface for Cognos. Again has good integration with Cognos connection. The equivalent product that we have currently is Hyperion Scorecards. Hopefully in 11g + of BI EE, we should have an integrated scorecarding application.
8. Cognos Event Studio - This basically does Event based and Business activity monitoring. Not sure whether we have an equivalent product for that (Without bringing in Oracle's FMW framework)

Apart from the above listed products there are other tools like xcelerator etc which are bundled in the toolset. Lets look at some of the above components at a high level.

Cognos Connection:

When you compare this with BI EE dashboards, the first impression that i got was Cognos has a lot more features in terms of dashboards customization. One can send alerts directly from a Cognos Connection page. Scheduling/delivering can all be done within the Cognos UI itself. Personalization is also pretty good. But the advantage of BI EE is, its more intuitive than a Cognos Connection is. The drag and  drop interface of BI EE is actually pretty good. Just to create a dashboard page, to me, it looked like a lot of clicks in Cognos. Cognos supports both Drillup and Drill down. But contextual drilling is not supported (11g of BI EE hopefully should bring in the Delivers integration closer to the Dashboards)

Cognos Administration:

What i liked about Cognos Administration is it brings in the Systems Administration, Security Administration and the scheduler administration in a single UI. That way a system BI admin can monitor all the admin related activities from a single UI. But again i felt that the granular control on who can do what is a big miss. Privilege control in Cognos is not as robust as BI EE is. In fact based on the install that i have, the UI does not seem to accept URL parameters at all (atleast for IIS i.e the URL does not change when we navigate from Dashboards to Report Studio etc). This can be an issue if you want to integrate Cognos with external applications (i am pretty sure there will be other means like web services, post methods etc but URL parameters are easier to use). But it supports URL parameters for passing parameters to a specific report (which is good)

Cognos Query Studio:

Somehow i feel that BI EE Answers is much more capable and robust than the Cognos Query Studio. The only advantage that i can see in using Cognos Query studio is it supports Drill up and Drill down. It also supports grouping (bins) within the query studio UI. But apart from that every other feature that Cognos Query Studio supports are available from Answers.  Charting features of Cognos is pretty basic. Though it supports drills on graphs, the amount of charts and the amount of customizations possible seem to be very limited when compared with BI EE. Same is the case with Pivot Tables as well.

Cognos Report Studio:

There is not much to say here apart from the fact that this looks more like the older Oracle Reports converted to a web based interface. Somehow i think BI Publisher is much more robust than Cognos report studio is. The only disadvantage is in the case of BI Publisher some advanced customizations typically will have to be done within the BIP word templates using XSL-FO. But in the case of Cognos all those are typically done in the web UI itself. Hopefully 11g will have a better Web based template engine. One point to note is, this has more charting options than BI Publisher. Now only if Oracle could merge the features of BI Publisher and Hyperion Financial Reporting at some point into a single tool it will be a real value add for new customers.

Cognos Framework Manager:

This component is probably the only reason that made me install Cognos. I have heard positive as well as negative jibes about the capabilities of this tool. It is very similar to BI EE repository administrator. But the similarity ends there. I will cover some more details of how framework manager can be used to report out of Oracle BI EE tommorrow. For now, my first impression on the tool is, it has a lot of features that BI EE repository offers. Though it does seem pretty robust, BI EE repository simply seems so much better than the framework manager. But one good aspect of Cognos is the versioning of its data model. It supports out of the box version control and multi-user development.

In the next couple of blog posts i will cover how BI EE can be integrated with Cognos (passing parameters between BI EE and Cognos reports) and how Cognos UI can be used to report out of BI EE repository. It is interesting to note that Cognos also has a packaged BI solution like BI SE1 which has all the capabilities of the original Cognos software. Even it is available only on Windows like BI SE1.

I could be wrong on some of my observations above as i have presented my analysis based on little exposure to the product. Feel free to correct/add them as comments here.