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Cognos Analytics and the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms Report

By Douglas Bonanno posted Wed February 26, 2020 02:07 PM

  

Since the release of the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant, the extended team and I have fielded many questions about the positioning of Cognos relative to where are product is today. Below I would like to share a summary of the teams view on the latest MQ.

Gartner does it again!

Gartner published the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms with no changes to the leaders’ quadrant. IBM disagrees with Gartner’s criteria, evaluation and ranking of vendors since it over-emphasizes self-service data visualization and under-weighs enterprise reporting.  But there is good news, Gartner states data visualization is becoming commoditized and highlights 2 emerging areas of differentiation: Integrated support for enterprise reporting capabilities and augmented analytics both of which Cognos Analytics supports today.

IBM improved on ability to execute, which is largely driven by positive client feedback. According to Gartner’s Peer Insights, client reviews in the last 12 months rank Cognos Analytics at 4.3/5 vs the leaders who average 4.4/5. This is a much narrower gap than the MQ portrays. The Cognos write-up is positive compared to other vendors highlighting three key areas: comprehensive functionality, product vision and, deployment options.

IBM Cautions
The cautions identified are easy to refute and rarely come up in sales cycles. Let’s take a look.

Loss of momentum and perception as innovator:  The authors measure momentum based on Gartner client inquiries and searches. IBM clients rarely contact Gartner because they are not impressed with their market coverage and don’t see the value. Contrary, to Gartner’s perception, we continue to have solid annual growth with hundreds of new clients and thousands of new users.

On the innovation front we introduced many new capabilities that our competitors do not offer with more on the way for 2020.  Native AI capabilities are infused across data prep, data exploration, dashboard creation and advanced analytics. Forecasting is far more advanced than the closest competitor as it extends across multiple series and is not limited to just line charts. Our new data science capabilities (Notebooks) are significantly more capable, secure and scalable than the competition.

Rareness of use as Sole Enterprise Standard: This caution is not unique to IBM, (Other MQ leaders are also called out for this) it is common practice today for many organizations have multiple enterprise standards.  IBM and other analysts see a shift in the market towards governance as companies look to mitigate issues of data silos and disconnected applications.

Pricing: Our cloud pricing is more competitive against the market leaders profiled here as all the enterprise capabilities are offered out-of-the-box vs vendors who charge for add-ons and extensions. IBM’s lowest priced tier on cloud includes authoring vs read-only.

Gartner Cautions on the “leaders”
The cautions are much more serious and cast doubt on each of these vendor’s ability to deliver.

Rank 1: Significant functional gaps on-prem | No platform flexibility | Connectivity to on-prem data
Rank 2: Weak governance and administration | Hidden costs of add-ons and extensions
Rank 3: Less than 50% claim enterprise standard | Migration issues| Adoption of self-service authoring
Rank 4: Numerous functional gaps | Limited global reach and community| Reliance on IT

This highlights that this MQ is a dangerous tool for a client looking to select an enterprise analytics platform.

Call to action

If you have the full report, always go beyond the picture and read it fully.  Help us by sharing your positive feedback with Gartner directly (no cost) by completing the Gartner Peer Review at: https://www.gartner.com/reviews/survey/home


Of course, if you wish to provide feedback directly to the IBM team, please reach out or fill out an NPS survey.

 

Mike Norris                                             Douglas Bonanno                    Chris McPherson
Director Offering Management          Global Sales Leader                 Offering Management Leader


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Comments

Wed March 18, 2020 02:25 PM

Gartner's analysis is quite strange. Overall the comment is positive, but the product is rather poorly classified. It's better than previous years, when it comes to comments.
Indeed CA has evolved and today it contains a lot of features that cover the perimeter of modern BI. Except - maybe - a disconnected client and smartphone application.
But having a lot of good features doesn't make it a good product ...
During the years, the Cognos user interface lagged behind the competition and the non-existent data visualization functions. So many customers have sought solutions with competing products: Qlick, Tableau, Power BI.
And these are good products. For what they do.
If IBM wants to recover the place that was that of Cognos it needs an exemplary product. In terms of functional consistency, quality of delivery and ergonomics. We are not there!
It is true that today we can do everything with CA, but how much matters. And there are always too many small imperfections that are irreversible for users. And for integrators.
Installer, welcome page can be improved.
Approach for dimensional reporting (modeling) needs to be clarified.
Quality of deliveries is unworthy of a company like IBM - I had to stop the deployment of 11.1R3 and 11.R.4 at my customers - I take care of a dozen accounts - because of blocking bugs.
FM is no longer improved, or DM cannot be used in multilingual context due to the impossibility of translating metadata.
...
What is the point of publishing a Jupiter client for Windows 10? I have never seen a client install a server under windows 10. How can we put visualizations without master-detail relationship in RS?
Graphics libraries in Report Studio : Charts, legacy visualisations, visualisations 11.0, visualisations 11.1 it's not too mutch ?

In many points it is necessary to do better, not more, clarify the scope of the product and improve the quantity of deliveries.

Jerzy