Enterprise Software Certification Report Business Intelligence IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2 Jorge Garcia, TEC Senior BI and Data Management Analyst July 2013
Table of Contents TEC Product Certification Report 3 Background and Analyst View 5 Product Highlights 7 Product Analysis 9 Analyst Summary 19 2
TEC Product Certification Report IBM Cognos BI v. 10.2 certified by Jorge Garcia, TEC Senior BI and Data Management Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers Demonstration conducted by Ben Foulkes, Software Solutions Expert, IBM Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is pleased to announce that IBM Cognos BI version 10.2 is now TEC Certified for online evaluation of business intelligence solutions in the Business Intelligence and Data Management Evaluation Center. The Business Intelligence and Data Management Evaluation Center enables you to compare and evaluate functionality based on TEC s comprehensive model of business intelligence software. Data used in the Evaluation Center are obtained from the vendor s responses to TEC s research questionnaire. Certification ensures that IBM has demonstrated Cognos BI 10.2 s support for specific real-world business processes chosen by TEC analysts; and that TEC analysts have analytically and comparatively reviewed research questionnaire data about Cognos BI 10.2 against known benchmarks. 3
Benefits of Evaluating a TEC Certified Product There are many benefits to evaluating a TEC Certified product. To potential clients of a software vendor, TEC certification provides the following: Reassurance: You can be assured that the data TEC provides about its certified products conform to a well-defined standard of accuracy. When a vendor s product is TEC Certified, it means that a trusted, independent third party has seen the product up close. Better communication with vendors: TEC certification helps ensure that vendors understand and respond accurately to their clients RFIs. Certification with TEC analysts provides the opportunity to clarify any issues with the RFI criteria. This ensures that the vendor is speaking the same language as its potential clients and gives the clients an unambiguous specification of product functionality to inform their selections. The certification seal is a valuable indicator for organizations that rely on the integrity of TEC s research services for assistance with their software selection projects. Organizations looking for a solution can be confident that they re comparing the product on an apples to apples basis with other, similar products. 4
Background and Analyst View Over the last five to ten years, the business intelligence (BI) space has changed dramatically, as many new innovations and players have come onto the scene on both the technology and business sides, and the resulting new business practices and methods being applied to the analytics world provides users with an increasing number of functional capabilities and better access to tools with those capabilities. In the arena of business intelligence for the enterprise, the incorporation of new technologies into BI solutions, and the ability of new business intelligence applications to be integrated within existing IT ecosystems of organizations has led to major developments in BI which are now being put into practice in many organizations around the world. Collaboration, mobile, cloud computing, and many other technologies are reshaping the BI ecosystem, and IBM has been an important player in enabling this evolution. Even before its acquisition from IBM in 2007, Cognos was a major player in the BI scene. Used by many important organizations around the world, Cognos, now IBM Cognos, an important component of IBM's software product portfolio, remains one of the top selling enterprise BI offerings in the world. Thanks to constant growth and an improvement strategy which includes the incorporation of functionality coming from inhouse development as well as features coming from additional products (often as a result of IBM's acquisitions), the IBM Cognos application stack remains growing and evolving so it can keep pace with the major needs for enterprises arising from new business and technological requirements. The current IBM Cognos stack, which IBM Cognos BI 10.2 is part of, is now a wide platform that provides a wide range of functionality for BI and enterprise performance management as well as a wide portfolio of specific applications for analytics, such as predictive analysis via dominant products in the space such as IBM SPSS, covering a large amount of analytics applications as well as other important analytics solutions as part of IBM's Smart Analytics System portfolio. So, led by a team of well-known experts from Cognos, IBM Cognos is nowadays one of the most important leaders in the business intelligence industry, providing one of the most important BI solutions on the market, oriented towards the enterprise and providing organizations with a robust, scalable and powerful solution for companies to deliver mission critical BI solutions. 5
Figure 1. Screencap of IBM Cognos BI 10.2 Dashboard IBM Cognos BI 10.2 has a full set of components to comply with all the different sets of requirements within a company's BI and data analytics cycle. Following is a list of IBM Cognos BI's key components: Metric Studio Event Studio Report Studio Query Studio Analysis Studio Cognos Insight Business Insight Advanced Business Insight IBM Cognos Viewer IBM Cognos Connection Framework Manager Transformer Metric Designer Create scorecards and metrics 6
Product Highlights During a demo session for TEC by IBM Cognos, it was possible to see many of IBM Cognos' key differences and benefits from its BI suite in action. Based on four main principles (ease of use, design, ease of implementation, and innovation), here are some product highlights worth mentioning from IBM Cognos BI: Ease of Use Layout: The general layout presented by IBM Cognos BI 10.2 is quite attractive and clean. Navigation across the solution is smooth and easy, with a gentle learning curve meaning that users are able to work with the application after only a short period of time. IBM Cognos BI is comprised of many components, such as the Report Studio, which provides a comprehensive platform to develop reports from scratch and design new reports from templates. Report Studio is also equipped with a complete set of tools for formatting and editing complex corporate reports and analytics. Its Query Studio is nicely designed and enables users to quickly create ad-hoc reports, reinforcing self service and reporting capabilities for those users who are in need of data discovery processes. Task performance: On the performance side, IBM Cognos BI's strong connection infrastructure and its internal data management features, such as its framework manager, guarantee best performance. Integration capabilities: IBM Cognos BI is well equipped with many integration capabilities for a wide number of disparate data sources, including many of the traditional relational databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix, etc) as well as a new connector for modern data management and database systems such as Netezza or Hadoop. Figure 2. IBM Cognos BI 10.2's data integration capabilities 7
General Design Information retrieval: Information retrieval from Cognos BI 10.2 is smooth and easy, and its search engine enables users to find and locate content effectively throughout the application. The process of recovering information from sources can be created and configured with ease, simplifying the task of connecting and recovering data from source systems. Reporting and data visualization capabilities: IBM Cognos BI offers a long list of functional features which makes the product an excellent competitor in this space. Reporting represents one of the core functional benefits of IBM Cognos BI; the solution has powerful abilities to design complex reports without coding, with the capability to use a wide set of graphic types, with a high degree of customization for charts. Editing a report is easy, and features such as trendlines within the graph can be configured and showed with just a couple of clicks. Ease of Implementation Server platforms: IBM Cognos BI can be deployed in a wide variety of operating systems (Windows, Linux, System z, etc.) and database platforms, which means the solution can be easily deployed within a wide range of configuration options, taking advantage of different platforms and their benefits. By working in a compatible way within the Microsoft and Linux environments, IBM Cognos BI can take advantage of both servers' main features, such as multicore environments, high availability capabilities, and data integration features for building customized data extraction and integration models. Innovation Collaboration: Cognos BI 10.2's collaboration capabilities are worth mentioning; with the availability of communication and networking tools IBM Cognos BI makes it possible for users to engage and collaborate to improve and hasten the decision-making process. Functionality: In the demo for TEC, IBM Cognos BI showed that it is a solution able to provide the complete set of BI capabilities, including reporting, dashboards, and data analysis, as well as collaboration and scorecarding and several capabilities to expand functionality to areas such as predictive and vertical analytics through native or third-party products. 8
Product Analysis The following high-level graphs identify IBM Cognos BI's functional focus and competitive strengths. All data may be reviewed in depth, using the TEC Advisor decision support system in TEC's public Evaluation Centers. The TEC Focus IndicatorTM This TEC Focus Indicator shows you which types of functionality are most likely to differentiate IBM s Cognos BI solution from other products in the business intelligence software space. It includes three zones indicating the product's functional focus: the Dominant Zone, Competitive Zone, and Minimal Support Zone. TEC's model of BI systems is designed with a comprehensive breadth; generally vendors will deliver a common base of functionality. While it's necessary to know whether a product supports a base of common functionality, it's very helpful to understand how a product really differs from the crowd. The rankings in this Focus Indicator represent neither the quality of the product nor an absolute quantity of supported functionality. Rather, the rankings show support relative to the quantity of functionality supported, on average, by software products in this market space. The functional focus axes indicate the modules of a typical BI product. Red dots that are near the center of the functional focus axes reveal where Cognos BI is more likely to differentiate itself through breadth of functionality. If your needs tend toward the type of functionality for which the red dots are located closer to the center of the Focus Indicator, this product will be a strong competitor for what you need. TEC Focus Indicator for IBM Cognos BI 10.2 9
Dominant Zone IBM Cognos BI 10.2 has six modules located in the Dominant Zone. During the demonstration with TEC analysts, IBM Cognos BI proved to be dominant in key areas such as reporting and dashboarding, analytics, data warehousing, workflow, data integration, and product technology. As shown in the graph, IBM shows its power in the BI arena with an application that performs outstandingly within enterprise-type BI configurations, with a wide range of capabilities and functional features, and a high level of technology features for adapting to corporate deployments with a large number of users and a diversity of configurations. Competitive Zone IBM Cognos BI 10.2 has one module, the Support module, in the Competitive Zone. IBM Cognos BI has a comprehensive set of features to enable support for its own set of technologies and to support working with third-party solutions, from common data sources to new so-called big data sources of information (Hadoop, Hbase, etc.) With these support capabilities, Cognos BI is not far behind its competitors within this module and scores very close to the Dominant zone for its support functionalities. 10
Understanding the TEC Focus Indicator Zones TEC defines an average solution using data about real software products available on the market. We assess the capabilities of the software and assign numeric ratings representing various levels of support in our models of enterprise software. Depending on the model, we use anywhere from a thousand to several thousand criteria to determine average scores. These models and product scores may be accessed through our publicly available Evaluation Centers. We calculate what an average solution would look like based on the features and functions about which software vendors have provided us with recent information. We then normalize the scores of this solution as the circle labeled "Industry Average" bisecting the TEC Focus Indicator graph. We also define boundaries on the high and low ends of the average, which are the demarcation points for passing into Dominant or Minimal Support zones. Next, we determine the quantity of functionality supported by the product for each module in our model. We assume that all criteria are equally important. In a real-world situation, of course, you would give a greater priority to criteria that are more important for your needs. However, for the sake of the TEC Focus Indicator analysis, we want to draw conclusions about the product's focus independently of any priorities. The Industry Average forms the benchmark from which we calculate the difference in functionality offered by the product. The difference between the product score and the Industry Average is plotted as a positive or negative distance from the Industry Average line. For example, if the product offers a greater quantity of support than average for a particular module, the red dot will be located toward the inner focus of the graph. Note that a product is not good or bad just because it has more or less functionality than other products. To understand whether it will do what you need it to do, at a price within your budget, you must evaluate the product in depth. The Zones The area of functional focus within the green Dominant Zone indicates where a product has a much greater level of support for functionality than the average solution in this market space. Dominant modules are likely to be competitive differentiators. The area of functional focus falling within the pale Competitive Zone indicates where the product has a level of support for functionality that is generally on par with what you can find from other solutions on the market. The functionality provided by the vendor likely remains a core part of the product's focus. In some cases such a module may be considered a commodity within the market: many vendors offer the majority of the functionality, which makes it difficult to differentiate a product based on breadth of that functionality alone. In other cases, a vendor may intend its product to compete on a level that satisfies most customers' requirements, with a market focus requiring that it differentiate itself through other modules or through the qualitative manner in which it provides its functionality. The Competitive Zone is bisected by the Industry Average circle, which shows the quantity of functionality supported, on average, by software products in this market space. The red Minimal Support Zone indicates where the product supports fewer features and functions than the average solution in the market. Modules listed in this zone are unlikely to be as important to the vendor s target clientele as the other modules. If a product has rankings in this zone, it generally offers the bare essentials and isn't focused on competing for clients that highly prioritize this functionality. Even if a product has modules in the Minimal Support zone, it may still be entirely capable of satisfying your requirements, particularly if the average solution on the market offers more functionality than you require. In all cases, it's likely that you will need to review the product in more depth to determine whether the functionality it provides in any zone is applicable or sufficient for your requirements. 11
Functionality Benchmarks The following functionality benchmark graphs represent the quantity of support by IBM Cognos BI 10.2 for the functionality within each module identified in the TEC Focus Indicator, on a scale of 0 to 100 points. The closer the plotted value is to 100 (toward the outside in spider graphs; toward the top in bar charts), the more functionality IBM Cognos BI (blue line) supports. For the sake of comparison, you can see an average of what competitor solutions offer by referring to the dashed orange line. Reporting and Analysis This module addresses all reporting capabilities and dashboarding features, important for establishing mechanisms to deploy and deliver information in a convenient way for users. Reporting, dashboards, scorecards, and enterprise searching enable users to interpret and analyze results. Criteria Legend 1 Reporting 2 Analysis 3 Enterprise Search 4 Scorecards 5 Dashboards The graph above shows the extensive coverage IBM Cognos BI has for traditional reporting and analysis capabilities. IBM's extensive and cumulative experience in the BI field is reflected in IBM Cognos BI's wide range of corporate reporting capabilities, including the ability for wide reporting distribution and handling. IBM Cognos BI provides complete coverage for the TEC Reporting and Analysis module, with a rank across the board of about 15 points above the industry average. 12
Analytics Analytics are one of the key functional areas for any BI solution. The functions of the Analytics module are divided into two types of analytics: core and predictive. While core analytics assumes the task of leveraging analytic tools to examine the current state of a business area or organization, predictive analytics helps users to unveil trends and create hypothetical future scenarios. This module is also comprised of data, text, and Web mining functional criteria, which enable a BI tool to discover hidden patterns underlying the data. Online analytical processing (OLAP) services provide users with tools to drill into any data set and to perform personalized analyses. Criteria Legend 1 Predictive Analytics 2 Data, Text, and Web Mining 3 OLAP 4 Core Analytics 5 Administration Much of the functional power of IBM Cognos BI is concentrated within the analytics section, a core area of many business intelligence solutions. Thanks to a natural evolutionary process based on its leadership in the BI space as well as additional software acquisitions to increase its coverage, IBM has been able to increase Cognos BI's functional power in analytics; for example its on-line analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities provide wide coverage for performing enterprise data analysis at both simple and complex levels. With version 10.2, IBM Cognos BI has also increased its capabilities to provide predictive analysis features to its users via SPSS functionality, now native in Cognos, or via its extensive third-party integration with the rest of IBM's analytics portfolio. Therefore IBM Cognos BI has extensive capabilities not just for prediction but also for important tasks such as Web and text mining and searching as well as performing specific analytics for specific lines of business (LoB) and industries. 13
Data Warehouse The Data Warehouse module addresses functionality for providing data, as well as the software infrastructure for deploying, integrating, and storing data from different sources in a unique information repository. This module thus refers to the system s ability to perform major data warehouse functions: dimensional modeling, data-related functions, etc. There is also a submodule that defines product support for these types of operations. Criteria Legend 1 Data Warehouse Functions 2 Product Support IBM Cognos BI provides built-in capabilities for data warehousing via native functionality as well as third-party integration with other native IBM applications, making Cognos BI a powerful tool for integrating enterprise BI solutions within complex data warehouse and other complex data management infrastructures. Cognos BI's metadata toolset plays an important role in helping users configure and deal with metadata in an easy but powerful way, thus enabling both business and technical users to customize and model metadata structures. 14
Workflow Workflow is a commonly used term that describes the automation of internal business operations, tasks, and transactions, to simplify and streamline current business processes. This module incorporates major workflow functionality that is useful from the BI perspective. An increasing number of BI software providers have come to realize the importance of incorporating capabilities for more process-centric activities, resulting in the automation of analysis processes as well as encouraging collaboration. In addition, workflow capabilities are gaining importance, enabling users to apply these capabilities within the decision support cycle. Criteria Legend 1 Process and Activity Definition 2 Resources and Roles Definition 3 Rules and Routing Definition 4 Work Definition 5 Queue and Work List Definition 6 Triggers and Scheduling 7 Monitoring and Reporting 8 Workflow Components 9 Dynamic and Complex Processes Due to its corporate focus, IBM Cognos BI has evolved in such a way that it has been able to incorporate many business process oriented features, such as workflow not generally a core functionality feature for other BI products in the market space. As it is possible to perceive from the graph above, IBM Cognos BI ranks above the average competitor solution as assessed by TEC. The product's approach to process and automation, and its ability to manage process-centric components such as rules and routing, makes IBM Cognos BI stand out against other competitors. Features for process and activities definition as well as ways to establish resources, roles, rules, and routing put IBM way ahead of the average functionality of BI solution vendors within TEC's knowledge base. IBM Cognos BI scores very highly in all of the Workflow sub-modules, achieving a perfect score of 100 in six of the nine submodules, including the areas of process and activity definition; rules and routing definition; work definition; queue and work list definition; triggers and scheduling; and monitoring and reporting. 15
Data Integration The Data Integration module involves functionality that addresses extract, transform, and load (ETL) and enterprise information integration (EII) processes. These processes combine data from different sources to provide a unified perspective of the data. They involve the processes of data quality and cleansing, along with the capability of loading data into a unique information recipient (usually a data warehouse system). Criteria Legend 1 ETL 2 EII IBM Cognos BI performs well above the average solution in the BI space for both ETL and EII processes. The solution has reinforced its data integration capabilities to provide all the necessary elements to perform simple or complex data extractions from multiple sources via native connectors or using IBM's extensive set of tools for performing complex data integration tasks such as InfoSphere Information Server or Infosphere DataStage. The following table shows some of the criteria IBM Cognos BI complies with for performing data extraction from diverse systems: 1 Concurrent processing of multiple source data streams, without writing procedures 2 Event-based change data capture 3 Bulk data movement 4 Explores raw data in disparate systems to uncover relationships and discrepancies between and within data sets 5 Source data can be selected from multiple tables in a SQL join 6 Components that can be used to work around the file size or platform limitations 7 Updates data capture and loads only changed records into the data source 8 Automatically generates data extract programs 9 Automatic updates for slowly changing dimensions Of interest is the fact that IBM Cognos BI has the capability to generate and explore raw data and uncover relationships as well as the automatic generation of data extract programs to speed up the data extraction development process. Another compelling feature is Cognos BI's ability to provide both ETL and EII features, which gives Cognos BI the flexibility to adapt to diverse systems arrangements and needs for data recovery and analysis. 16
Support Besides general BI functionality, it is important to consider other features in a BI solution, such as support. The Support module groups the set of features necessary for evaluating the customer help component of BI functionality. Server and client support, as well as database and portal support, are some general features that are measured in this module. Criteria Legend 1 Server Support 2 Client Support 3 Database Support 4 Portal Support 5 Web Service Support 6 Problem Resolution 7 Application Fix Response Time Being one of the most dominant solutions in the BI space for a number of years now, IBM Cognos BI was built as and has continued evolving as a mature corporate solution, offering a complete platform for data analysis and management. This robustness is accompanied by the ability to fit within different environments and platforms Cognos BI has the capability to be deployed in several operating system platforms and to use several of the existing IBM databases, DB2 and Informix, as well as third-party database providers such as Oracle and others; hence the extensive support from Cognos BI for servers and client interfaces such as Web browser and client-server applications. Cognos BI achieves a perfect score of 100 in the Web Service Support and Client Support categories and in the Database Support, Portal Support, and Problem Resolution sub-modules in TEC's Support module. Only in the application fix response time category does Cognos BI score below the industry average, due to the fact that IBM's support structure is structured differently, applying specialized resources available at all times to fulfill customer needs and bring support. Cognos BI's server support includes support for: 1 Windows 2 Unix 3 Sun Solaris 4 GNU/Linux such as Red Hat, SUSE (Novell), or Debian However, IBM manages different levels of support, delegating some of it to specialized partners and consultants. Cognos BI offers mixed collaborative support via partners and specialized teams from IBM, most of the time providing support within one working day. 17
Product Technology Product technology criteria define the technical architecture of the product, and the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Sub-criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support, and integration capabilities. Criteria Legend 1 Synchronization and Replication 2 Implementation and Training 3 Technical Fit IBM Cognos BI shows solid evolution within the product technology space. On the graph above, it is clear that IBM Cognos BI provides wide product technology coverage, with a centralized management area for configuring and managing its technology features. IBM Cognos BI offers a wide number of configuration features, including a native multilingual ability to enable the customization of diverse tasks and interfaces. Its ability to configure cache, system spacing, and performance as well as comprehensive methods for managing metadata and custom application building are important assets from Cognos BI. Cognos BI's ability for integration within complex IT infrastructures and availability of advanced resources for technical administration of the BI platform is shown by the solution's high scores in comparison to TEC's industry average. 18
Analyst Summary By focusing on providing powerful BI functionality features and solid preparation and configuration for the enterprise, IBM Cognos BI has the advantage of providing full-fledged solid solutions for different industries and lines of business. Offering a complete set of components, including metric and event studio applications, gives Cognos BI a great deal of flexibility for complex metric and event configuration, providing control over the decision-making process with a process-oriented approach. Its new approach, to build based on a business intelligence platform, is giving Cognos BI new opportunities and capabilities to allow users to scale and meet their BI needs based on block building in a more agile way. Cognos BI's Framework Manager enables organizations to have control over their metadata models, giving the advantage of having complete control over their BI semantic layer to provide better data governance and quality. During the demo session conducted by IBM, it was possible to see why Cognos BI is one of the leaders in the BI software space, providing a solid combination of technological capabilities and business-oriented architecture well suited for enterprise needs. Overall, IBM's Cognos BI offering remains a leaders in the BI and analytics software segment, with a solid solution able to fulfill many complex corporate requirements. Compare Business Intelligence Solutions Now! Use TEC Advisor to compare IBM Cognos BI with other BI solutions, according to your organization's needs and characteristics. It's free, fast, online, and easy and you'll see the results immediately. 19
About Technology Evaluation Centers Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) provides insight and expertise in offering impartial resources and services to minimize the costs, risks, and time associated with software selection. Over 3.5 million technology decision makers visit TEC s Web sites each month, to find information on hundreds of solutions, and to access articles, white papers, and podcasts. TEC s decision support system (DSS) and analyst data assist with the evaluation, comparison, and selection of enterprise solutions and services. TEC s offerings include in-depth research, detailed product information, and software selection services for any industry or company size. Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. 740 St. Maurice, 4th Floor Montreal, Quebec Canada, H3C 1L5 Phone: +1 514-954-3665 Toll-free: 1-800-496-1303 Fax: +1 514-954-9739 E-mail: asktheexperts@technologyevaluation.com Web site: www.technologyevaluation.com TEC, TEC Advisor, and ERGO are trademarks of Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Inc. All rights reserved. COG160713 20