BusinessObjects Board

BusObj vs Cognos questions

general discussion
#1

Hi,

My firm is in the process of evaluating BusinessObjects and Cognos :roll_eyes:. This is in order to determine which product would be given the nod to have a bigger footprint/hold in the company (we have licenses for both).

I already have done a search on Cognos in this forum. However, I wasn’t able to find answers to the following specifics. I am writing in the hope that someone in the forum with BusObj and Cognos experience is able to answer the following questions:

  1. In theory, how would the report response time compare between Cognos Impromptu and BusObj FC? Assume both accesses a relational database / star schema database eg. on Oracle.

  2. Cognos Powerplay - is it easy for (non-IT) business users to build a pre-built or ad-hoc report on PowerPlay?

  3. How “integrated” is Cognos Impromptu & Impromptu Net compare to BusObj & Webi? Eg. Report in BusObj FC can be run & displayed in Webi reasonably well.

  4. Cognos ReportNet - does it act as both FC and thin client, or is it something like Webi 6?

  5. Excel-like tabs and Alerters in BusObj - does both PowerPlay and Impromptu have this feature?

  6. Does Cognos PowerPlay have report scheduling equivalence of BCA, just as Cognos Impromptu has?

  7. Cognos claims to have shared metadata. I perceive this to mean sharing of metadata between the reporting tool, the ETL tool, and the Datawarehouse. Can anybody confirm this?

I know the above is a lot of questions, and would appreciate any answer or direction to any question that you can give. Many thanks in advance.

:slight_smile:

Platypus :australia: (BOB member since 2002-10-23)

#2

Just to be sure you didn’t miss it, did you have a look at this topic? It’s a “sticky” topic at the top of this forum.

Dave Rathbun :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-06)

#3

Yes, I did. Thanks anyway. Though the things there are great, I couldn’t find anything there that helps to answer any of the questions I have.

Platypus :australia: (BOB member since 2002-10-23)

#4

ReportNet has two thin clients. One is more robust than the other. They are both totally web based and zero footprint if I recall correctly.

Cindy Clayton :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-11)

#5

Hi,

I have not received responses to the questions sufficient to complete the full set. Probably this has to do with the timing - the questions were asked at the time when it seemed everyone was preparing for the 2003 BusObj International Conference, or busily griping because they couldn’t go (Pheonix, U.S. was too far and the Aussie dollar wasn’t as strong as it is now) :slight_smile: . I shall attempt to answer my own questions to share my experience.

At this stage of the project, we aren’t ready to start a dialog with a Cognos consultancy (the name of the consultancy is, well, “Cognos” :roll_eyes: ). So, hopefully this will also be read by a Cognos expert who is about to jump ship, or already had jumped 8) .

The analyse and fetch stages would be about the same, as one is talking about benchmarking against the same DBMS and network. For the computing stage however, I don’t know how they would compare for a report that is reasonably complex i.e. lots of in-report calculations and roll-ups.

I would say, “yes.” But with Powerplay, you won’t have presentation quality reports as you would in BusObj or Impromptu. i.e. formatting options are much more limited.

Don’t know the answer.

It is web-based. As Cindy has pointed out, it has 2 thin clients. I am not sure what “2 thin clients” means exactly.

Tabs - no. Alerters - sort of. I suspect in Cognos the alerter will not be in-cell, rather has to have it as a “traffic light” in a separate column. Awaiting confirmation or otherwise.

Unable to answer. However, a separate Cognos module does the scheduling & distribution.

Apparently shares metadata between Decision Stream, which is their ETL product, and Transformer OLAP modelling. Not sure about if catalogs and reporting are within the “reach” of the metadata sharing.

Platypus :australia: (BOB member since 2002-10-23)