IBM Cognos is an established product with a large user base. It is a full-featured platform comprising Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with some newer tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search and dashboards.
- Query Studio: Designed for non-technical users to rapidly create simple reports
- Report Studio: Report Studio is the main report design, creation and distribution tool
- Analysis Studio: Analysis Studio is for exploring and comparing dimensional data
- Event Studio: Event Studio is for setting up data monitoring and exception alerts
- Metric Studio: Metric Studio is for creating KPI dashboards and scorecards
- Cognos Administration: Central management interface for performing all administrative tasks
This technology is very mature and reliable, and is designed primarily for larger deployments. However, it does requires significant resources to deploy and maintain.
IBM launched a limited release of its Watson Analytics platform in 2014 as a foray into the data discovery space. This product combines the power of Watson’s cognitive computing technology with existing predictive analytics capabilities to produce a natural language query engine. The result is a very powerful analytics engine for ordinary business users