I’ve been asked to look at migrating off BO to MSTR or Cognos, the powers that be have stated these are the only two products I can migrate to and I must pick one.
Currently we have a typical BO setup with lots of schedules and powers users building reports etc etc in Webi, looking to migrate around 300 reports. I don’t know MSTR or Cognos apart from some vender demos we have had and what I have seen myself from looking online / youtube.
Anyone who knows these products and has real world experience of it if you were asked to move off BO what would you pick MSTR or Cognos ?
Like for like I think Cognos (its called Cognos Analytics now) is probably most BI 4.2 a like. Server side is horrible though (seems very resource heavy to me) and so are the thick client tools, some look to have been written in the 1990s. The web front end is nice though, albeit from what I could tell not as powerful as Webi. Would be a lot of work involved re-doing the Universes into Cognos packages too, it`s basically a complete re-write.
Personally, unless this is for costs (which I doubt it is coz neither are cheap!) I wouldn`t bother!
Thanks - luckily I don’t have to manage the backend server side these days we just use a central shared platform where I work for all the reporting tools.
Agreed it is a rewrite whatever we go to, its not something we want to do but its being forced on us as part of a wider company initiative to ditch BO completely. I’ve told them it will be a nightmare to do and also we are the first in the company to do it. The BO platform we have is around 11 years old so I’m currently trying to decom as much crap as I can. We have Tableau already but just not what we need to replace the type of BO reports we have and the type of scheduling we need.
Why swap out BO for Cognos, it can’t be for cost reasons!
I’d also go for Cognos - Framework Manager you’ll find is very much like UDT/IDT with its three level approach to the semantic layer. The reporting tool isn’t as good but if you do any OLAP work, then Cognos beats BO because it has its own cube functionality.
Theres not any functional reasons in Cognos for the change is there?, they have this really cool tools in the stack, like event studio where theres no comparison in SAP BI. I did a migration study for a customer recently where the idea was going Cognos > SAP BI, however, they were heavily dependant on some of these niche things Cognos did.
In terms of the reporting tool being better, that depends if you look at the newest version of Cognos Analytics. It`s moving into the more data visualisation sphere as opposed to reporting (it looks more like SAC than it does old Cognos!).
I agree Andy - it would take a significant functional requirement to ditch the overall investment (training, experience, development, etc.) in BO to move to Cognos (or vice versa to be fair). It’s only when a tool isn’t fit for purpose (functionally or financially) that you should be looking at moving.
Yeah it a crazy idea to move off BO to a different tool I totally agree, the amount of work required is massive for no real benefit, where I work though BO is now none approved technology and anyone on BO has to move to either Cognos or MSTR. Not sure why its not approved but its coming from the top so have no choice.
(BOB member since 2002-10-04)