IBM Cognos Analytics

Cognos is an incredibly powerful reporting tool offered by IBM and it has a wonderful ability to be customized across different industries and companies. It can transform work efficiency but automating virtually any data that exists in a company's primary accounting and finance system.

Cognos is not very user-friendly and often times it can take a while for an individual working with Congos to get familiar with the functionality and the power this tool possesses. Furthermore, report writing and query studio functionality require some database knowledge so the true power of the tool is sometimes limited by these factors.

Pixel perfect printing. Most competitors have tagged printing as a way of the past, but there’s still a half generation that relies heavily upon it. This can’t be overlooked.

The flexibility/functionality of the viz tools can’t compete with competitors. I think it also has a more difficult learning curve. It isn’t an intuitive tool.

The ability to visualize data in many way all using the same utility is beneficial so we don't have to worry about multiple deployment/support patterns. Having an in-memory OLAP option made performance less of an issue compared to hitting an on-prem database directly for everything. The ability to add custom code allows for some really creative solutions to unique business problems in reporting.

We felt the interface and functionality was a little dated - our more technical employees were fine but the more analyst-type developers preferred something "prettier"/"friendlier" like Tableau/Power BI. It also got expensive for us which was one of the two the primary reasons we transitioned. This is obviously dependent on the number of users, so consider your own environment of course.