Navigating Cognos Analytics 12
Discover how Cognos Analytics 12 can help you make better and faster business decisions with AI-powered insights. This webinar covers an introduction to the new Cognos Analytics 12, showing you how it is an ideal BI tool that complements the knowledge workers. You will see real-life examples of how easy it is to get insights from your data without needing to code.
Webinar Speakers:
Anjela Ubogu, Account Director Northdoor
Steven Green, EMEA Technical Manager, Business Analytics, IBM
Rob Batters, Director Managed and Technical Services, Northdoor.
Read our blog on Navigating IBM Cognos Analytics
Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce you to a unique and informative fireside chat navigating Cognos Analytics, 12 installations and upgrades. This event represents a collaborative initiative between IBM and Northdoor to explore the evolving landscape of data analytics and the imperative journey to Cognos Analytics 12. In the rapidly advancing world of business intelligence, staying at the forefront of innovation is more crucial than ever.
The Cognos Analytics platform has always been a cornerstone in helping organisations leverage their data effectively. And with the introduction of Cognos Analytics 12, we are on the cusp of a transformative leap forward. This event is a testament to our commitment to providing you with the knowledge and tools to excel in the ever-evolving world of data analytics. As we embark on this journey, we encourage you to actively engage with our expert speaker, ask questions and make the most of this opportunity to enhance your understanding of Cognos Analytics.
Thank you for joining us today. I want to hand over to my esteemed colleague Anjela Ubogu, a distinguished leader at Northdoor with an impressive track record in navigating organisations through the intricacies of IT solutions, including Cognos Analytics.
Anjela Ubogu
Thank you for that introduction, Rob. I’m Anjela from Northdoor, your host for the webinar. Northdoor is a corporate IT consultancy firm. We apply our knowledge and expertise to help businesses capture, manage, protect and analyse large volumes of commercial data. Why are we here today? This fireside chat will delve into the practical insights that empower your organisation to embrace Cognos Analytics 12 effectively.
We will explore the key features, customisation options, security enhancements and strategy for a seamless transition or a new installation. With me, today is Stephen Green. Stephen has been with IBM for nearly 27 years and is the Europe, UK, Middle East and Africa Technical Manager for Business Analytics. For ten years before IBM, Stephen was a Cognos customer.
Stephen combines strong business industry experience with excellent technical and architectural skills to help our customers develop strategies, infusing data and analytics to support those business challenges. Welcome, Stephen.
Stephen, with the release of Cognos Analytics 12, what differentiates us from the rest of the market?
Stephen Green
I think the biggest differentiator when looking at Cognos Analytics compared to many of our competitors is the breadth of the offering. If you think about what people want to do, we’re not just doing the dashboards. There’s a lot more to life than just the dashboard. Dashboards are important. You wouldn’t drive a car without a dashboard. You wouldn’t really drive a business without a dashboard.
But you need other information as well. You need those base reports; reporting is not sexy. It’s not. It’s not fancy. Nobody’s talking about it. But it’s vital for running a business. If you think about it, you need to know how many widgets of X you’ve got in warehouse A, for instance; it’s not particularly sexy, but it’s vital to running the business.
Cognos Analytics has that full breadth. We can go from that very detailed pixel-perfect reporting if we wish to through dashboard, through analysis, through data mining tools built into the product, through exploration, through storyboarding, and even out to mobile, all in that one single installation, one single product, not optional add ons.
Anjela Ubogu
What are some of those standout features for Cognos analytics?
Stephen Green
One of the first things you noticed that changed from the early versions, like 11.2.4, is the current long-term support of the assistant. The assistant has moved from being a dashboard component where you ask questions to right at the front. The first time you connect and log in, the assistant is there.
What do you want to do? What do you want to know? You can straightaway start asking questions. What were my sales last quarter or since Christmas? It will analyse the data, find the correct information, and generate the information straight there. And from that, you can go straight away and create a dashboard.
You don’t have to go into the tool. You can click a button and go there or share it and send it out to people. We can do a lot of work on performance as well when performance is key. People always say, What’s an exact performance of a computer? I tend to say instantaneous. Everything else is a compromise, but people will compromise depending on the amount of data.
If you think about performance, the more data you have, the worse it gets, particularly around the dashboard when you’ve got lots of objects. We do a lot of work on the performance behind the scenes in terms of the query, but also caching. When you’re in a dashboard, you should be able to click a button and see it straight away.
Don’t forget that Cognos is aimed at business users. I don’t want to know how to do that. I want a button, and this is automatic. You don’t need to understand programming to activate.
Anjela Ubogu
You mentioned about user experience just then. What sort of improvements have we had for non-technical users?
Stephen Green
For the non-technical user, what you’re looking at there is sort of the business terminology. Instead of having to think in computer terms, you really can think in business terms. Rather than saying I’m trying to work out my revenue or my transactions, you can just say since Christmas, and it knows what Christmas is and it knows when it was last quarter relative time.
That sort of thing. I mean by sort of business using terminology because it’s also a natural language. When you ask the question, it should reply in a term that you can understand. If you think about, let’s say one asset, what was my revenue, it will say 12.5839642 million. The computer would do that all to the decimal point.
We don’t understand it. It’s 12.5 million, it’ll arrange how it does it to suit us. And instead of creating a chart, if it needs a simple answer, it will give you a simple answer. When you talk about business users, they need to be able to access it easily and everybody in the organisation needs to access it regardless of abilities or whatever.
We have built-in accessibility options. If you have sight problems, then all the standards are supported. Things like Jaws, readers, high contrast make it much easier to integrate into business and make everybody use it. Nobody’s using it. You’re not going to get the benefit.
Anjela Ubogu
Yeah, absolutely. But that’s just brought it across the whole spectrum, then. What about mobile? Is it possible to use this on mobile devices?
Stephen Green
Mobile comes in multiple forms. I mean, there is mobile working, which is big and everybody likes to work from home these days or not, depending if you’ve got kids, But if you want to work from it, it’s fine because there’s no in store for the main product. It’s all web-based. It’s all through the browser, no plug ins, it all runs.
That said, in fact, it’s also what we call stateless. We’re not holding any resources on the server while you’re looking at it. Yeah, you can run it on any device that can handle a web browser. We don’t recommend going below about eight inches, a tablet-type format is fine. I quite regularly run on a tablet, and in 12, we’ve done a lot of work in auto-scaling.
Regardless of where it is, it will work out what size screen you want. It will scale the charts accordingly to fit the display. When you go to a phone, we’re into a different matter, but we’ll talk about it.
Anjela Ubogu
I just wanted to say that if the audience has any questions, could you please add these to the chat? Conor will let us know about these. Right.
Stephen, I’d like to move on to customisation and reporting. Can you explain the levels of customisation available for Cognos 12?
Stephen Green
You can customise as much as you want. You can change the look and feel of the whole interface. We come with some themes, and we have a superb carbonx theme, which is fantastic. If you don’t like that, you want to put a corporate thing, knock yourself out. You can bring in your company logos; you can even have subdivisions.
If you have a corporate and you have some companies, we can tailor them based on who you are as to what view you see, what logos you see, what dashboards, what reports, etc., all from that one instance, you don’t need to create multiple instances. Don’t forget, as I said, reporting is a key strength.
When you talk about customisations, people get very excited about how do I actually make this look. I want this pixel-perfect. We can go down to the actual point on the screen with reporting as to where you actually want to lay things out. In terms of customisation, setting it and, of course, if you’re looking at making these extended, there are a lot of things you need to do to make data more accessible, and a classic one is like a map.
Anjela Ubogu
We’ve been talking about customisation in the reporting. How about collaboration so that we can get all of our team involved?
Stephen Green
Collaboration is vital. You can have the best report dashboard in the world. If it’s just sitting in your drawer and nobody’s looking at it, it’s completely useless. You need to be able to get out there and share it. Classic email, everybody knows how to send an email, but that’s kind of old technology.
Anjela Ubogu
It’s pretty old school.
Stephen Green
Yeah. It’s still important, though, in business-to-business type activities, and you’d want to be able to burst the report automatically. So you get your versions, others get your version, whatever you need. That, again, is standard. We’re not an add-on, but in terms of most collaboration, it’s when you’re interacting with data.
We support Slack, and IBM uses Slack as a collaboration tool. Many companies use it; it’s a good tool, and we also support Microsoft Teams. The world runs on Microsoft; get over it. We need to be able to integrate with teams. We now fully integrate into Teams at the dashboard so you can have chats and discussions. You can use the dashboard, and dashboards live inside Teams. So you can collaborate and interact with it.
Anjela Ubogu
OK, so we’ve spoken about reporting and collaboration. How about machine learning and AI? How is Cognos Analytics 12 coping with that?
Stephen Green
Machine learning is an exciting topic, and around the whole AI topic, AI is embedded inside business intelligence tools. There’s a full discussion here; we could spend the entire half hour just talking around that, but luckily, we’re not going to, don’t worry. But what commonality does is a lot of artificial intelligence and recommenders working.
I prefer the term symbiotic. There are different levels, including analytics and Cognos 12. At the moment, the critical bit is more symbiotic. So you want to do something, and the machine will work out the best way. And so the machine saying this is what you need to do, which is what many people think.
How are killer robots invading the world? It’s more around, I want to do this. I need to get this information. I need to get it out to these people. I need to work that out for you so you decide what you want to do and do it, also learning what you’re doing along the way. So not only will it help you choose the correct chart, but it also help you understand how you would like to work with it.
So it’ll work out if it keeps presenting you with a pie chart, and you immediately change it. It doesn’t like pie charts and will stop recommending that as the first. It will start recommending other types of charts.
Anjela Ubogu
OK. And is this available out of the box?
Stephen Green
It’s all built-in, so there’s nothing extra. Everything we’re talking about is the standard product single install.
Anjela Ubogu
Stephen, I’d like to go a little bit left field now and talk about integration and the capabilities around that. And perhaps look at data connections and what’s available there.
Stephen Green
OK. So, one of the other strengths I get is going to be a lot of strengths.
Anjela Ubogu
Great. What we like.
Stephen Green
A key strength of governance is its data connections. It is data agnostic. We’re not tied to a single data structure. What you have, we can link to it. The preferred method is JDBC. The moment we start using the JDBC connectors, it’s a lot more efficient and gives you a lot more flexibility in some of the commands you can do.
But obviously, we still have our data structure there as well. We don’t make you throw anything away. If you’ve got an older structure and still using the native connector, fine, you can carry on. But we also support other things like cdata. So cdata is a service, so we provide the link to the service.
We don’t provide the service, but you can now connect columns, analytics to cdata. This allows you to connect to things like streaming sources or sources that you wouldn’t naturally normally want to analyse. But you have to remember that, of course, we are still thinking about structured data. We’re not really being unstructured. This is an analysis tool. It’s not a data science tool. This is still doing this set. That said, the things like that we would call out to Watson Studio.
We also connect to the new offering from IBM, IBM Watson and data, which is in a data lakehouse, so you get all the benefits of the data lake In terms of storing the data and the benefits of warehouse in terms of it’s nice structure, and it’s sort of conformed dimensional structures in order to make the reporting easier.
Anjela Ubogu
Stephen, we’ve got customers that are seeing significant growth. What sort of scalability and performance do we have available with Cognos Analytics 12?
Stephen Green
Cognos’s Analytics was built to be scalable. It was built from the ground up to support anything from one or two users to hundreds of thousands of users. And we’ve got multinational companies running software, and there are different ways to scale, of course. Companies can scale vertically and horizontally. You can add if you’re growing on-prem, you can add more machines side by side, and you can then share the load across.
It’s fully scalable, sideways. You can also move to things like cloud. Moving to SAS, we have a lot of customers interested mostly in looking at how they support their infrastructure and moving to the SAS, SAS gives you a lot of benefits in terms of scalability. You don’t need to worry about it. It’s somebody else’s problem.
And IBM uses the concept of a cloud hosted. We’re also looking at moving on to the likes of AWS and Azure. We also have it based on OpenShift, so we’re generating containers, structures in the cloud often, by the way, as in containers, but you don’t need to know. That’s the beauty of the cloud offering. I don’t need to know.
It just works, and somebody else worries about it. But in terms of the containers structures for taking on OpenShift, which we now released on our data platform, the system will auto-scale it. So if it blocks, let’s say, the query server goes down, traditionally, you’d have to restart the whole machine, in containers, that container just dies, and it respawns and starts straight away.
You don’t need to do anything. Users will notice a small drop in performance for a while, and then it will carry on, but it will also scale automatically. If a service gets blocked, then the system will spawn more containers to actually share the load across and auto-share them across and it will kill them as well.
We’ll go back down to the minimum to not block the hardware as it needs. So it auto breeds, if you like, breeds as the demand loads.
Anjela Ubogu
Right. Well, that also covered my performance because you’re saying it doesn’t matter how many users we have; it’ll still be performing.
Stephen Green
Yes, it will still perform. And there are obviously some techniques in terms of handling and how you actually structure data because if you think about performance, performance is quite often people will say Cognos is slow, always continuous. Cognos happens to be on glass. So when you’re looking at a computer screen, the thing that’s causing the problem is the thing that you’re looking at regardless of what’s underneath, like the database of the structures, which tends to be where the issues are.
They tend to be somewhere else other than Cognos. When we actually analyse it, there are little things we can do to help, right? Pre caching. We use things like data sets which run the more complicated set.
Anjela Ubogu
What sort of security enhancements have we got in Cognos12?
Stephen Green
It’s nothing specifically for 12 around security, but you go back to when the product was actually designed, which is called Reportnet around actually turn the century, show our age, but 2001 2002 yeah the thing was built with security in mind, all the data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. All moving data, as well as static data, is encrypted. We had a lot of tight security based at that level, improved it over time. We’ve added new ciphers, new codes as they come on, and we’ve made it easier to understand what’s happening inside the product. There’s nothing special in extra internal control versus 11, but it’s still hyper secure.
Anjela Ubogu
I’d like to move on to migrations and upgrades. What would be IBM’s recommendation?
Stephen Green
It’s a moving upgrade from 11 to 12? It’s pretty straightforward. It’s an over-the-top install. It will move everything forward automatically. The interface has changed. So you need to re-educate your user that you may have to update your documentation, etc. Moving from an early version, like 10, was quite a big jump from 10 to 11 into the 12 session.
And we probably recommend getting some help with that one. It may be contracting out to yourselves.
Anjela Ubogu
We”re nearing the end of a proof of concept for one of our customers going from 10.2 to 11 2.4. The most significant changes are around the dashboard look and feel of Cogno legacy studios and licensing models. We’re using the POC to review the security report usage folder structure and create a clear upgrade path.
Northdoor services are underpinned by our unique AIM methodology, which stands for Advise, Implement and Manage. We’d be happy to discuss this further, so please let me know.
Stephen Green
I just got the question in the chat box regarding the Legacy Studios. What’s happened to the studios? Studio, analysis studio. Let’s be honest. We announced years ago that we were going to kill it. This shouldn’t surprise anybody; in 11.2.4, they are still there. They are not in 12.
The biggest killer of it was Microsoft because when Microsoft dropped support for Internet Explorer and went to Edge, Edge was based on the Chrome engine. They never worked in Chrome. We never supported the Chrome engine. So, the support from Microsoft shows that it still works in Firefox in 11.2.4.
If you use Firefox, that’s great. You don’t have a problem. But we would encourage people to consider moving off those legacy studios.
Anjela Ubogu
Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve found that what we’re doing at the moment is we’re keeping one copy of Firefox so that we can make sure that we can cover those reports, but they will be migrated off. OK. what about support and training during this process? How would we handle that from an IBM perspective?
Stephen Green
IBM has average support, so we have the full S&S support. You get upgrades; you get the fix packs as needed. To me, you’re paying for support, and we do. We don’t do training directly; IBM always points people at business partners like yourselves.
Anjela Ubogu
Yeah, absolutely. And as part of our AIM methodology, part of that process also covers training and support. Stephen, one thing we haven’t covered yet is pricing and licensing. Could you give me a little overview of that?
Stephen Green
It’s a very reasonable price. It’s beneficial and probably already a considerable volume in the market. if we look at this, pricing and licensing are two areas people get very excited about. Our licensing model now is quite simple. This is only for primary licenses administrator, explorer, user and viewer.
Now, the view of license is really for business to business. This is where you’ve got hundreds of thousands of users in the company, but you only want to look at it and use it. I always say that don’t employ people to play with computers. You hire them to run the business. You have a team you use to play with computers; they provide the information then.
Controlling that access is quite important. The primary model is the user license. The user license these days can do pretty much everything. It can do explorations, create data structures, create reports, great dashboards, and great stories. It’s powerful. We’ve simplified this. But don’t forget that we’ve got multiple platforms as well.
We have the on-prem, the SAS services and these licenses apply to all of those, but we also have an on-demand offering. So people say comms is expensive to start, but it’s not. So, we have this on-demand offering with a shallow entry point. A standard user costs $10 a month; the premium version, which has full authoring capabilities, is $40 a month.
But from that level, we’re very, very price competitive because that’s it. There are no hidden costs, extra services, or different things you need. It’s provisions or purchase. That’s it!
Anjela Ubogu
I’m grateful for the simplified creation of the licensing staff, so it’s made my life a lot easier for me.
Stephen Green
And that’s better than the 15 we used to have.
Anjela Ubogu
Exactly. We’ve had a question come in on the chat. The question is for you, Stephen. What is the future of Cognos? What do we have to look forward to?
Stephen Green
Despite the rumours of its death, Cognos is very well alive and kicking, and it’s starting to come on again; we did take our eye off the board a few years ago, but the focus is very much there, and it’s an essential product for IBM because if you look at what we use it for, this is embedded in a lot of IBM products as the reporting component more than you may think.
It’s also growing. We are adding new features and getting new functionality, and AI will be more and more critical as time passes. And I don’t mean necessarily linking to things like chatbots because we’re more interested in industry standards or accurate industry weight models. IBM processes have a significant impact and are a good investment in this arena, with Watson next to AI.
I’m like language models, and how do we integrate them? If I’m thinking some daydreaming away, I know that development is looking at ways to go into a system with your assistant and say, tell me about it. It will generate dashboards and reports and explain them. So that’s how people want to go and make me more business-focused.
I mean, we do have a roadmap despite what people think. We do have a good roadmap, and there is a public roadmap site that you can look at, but if you want a detailed one, contact Northdoor or me. And we will be more than happy to go through it with you.
Anjela Ubogu
All right. Well, on that note. Thank you very much for your time, Stephen. We have a few outstanding questions in the chat with Conor; we will pick those up and get back to you shortly with further information. Northdoor would be pleased to offer a free workshop that covers new installations or upgrades. We’ll follow up on this shortly with information about that workshop. Thank you very much for attending, and it’s goodbye from us.
Stephen Green
Thanks very much.