In September 2018, we took strategic steps to infuse AI capabilities into our flagship business analytics solution, Cognos Analytics, to empower clients and assist them on their AI journeys.  

The strategy is working.  Since the release of Cognos Analytics 11.1, clients around the world and across an extensive list of industries, including: banking, education, energy, insurance, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media & entertainment, retail, telecom, and travel & transportation are leveraging the software to get a leg up on the competition and drive their operations forward. Recent testimonials from clients like  Ziff Properties, Miami-Dade County, and a.s.r, showcase the enthusiasm for this release.

These great testimonials, as well as the opinions of a growing list of esteemed industry analysts, caused me to put this blog together to respectfully disagree with the latest viewpoint of Gartner about where to position Cognos Analytics 11.1 in the organization’s 2019 Magic Quadrant (MQ) for analytics and BI platforms.

For starters, Gartner’s MQ only focuses on standalone products, rather than consider how the product integrates with business analytics and data science portfolio.  Not only does IBM meet customer needs across the analytics cycle — including descriptive and diagnostic analytics, planning analytics, predictive analytics prescriptive analytics — but also allows customers to scale on demand with what we refer to as the AI Ladder. Considering that clients enter and adopt AI at different levels depending on projects, people and expertise, IBM, through solutions like Cognos Analytics 11.1, can help them start at the most strategic place and then move them quickly to be able to leverage AI as a business driver.

This strategy aligns with Gartner’s Reference Analytics Architecture which comprises the information portal, analytics workbench, data science laboratory artificial intelligence hub.  It provides technical a reference architecture for a multitool BI environment that enables decision making without dependence on IT.

Over the years, and especially within the last 18 months, Cognos Analytics has won numerous awards for design and performance, including last month's Big Innovation 2019 award from Business Intelligence Group, for innovation. We are leading the way in AI with our next-generation business intelligence platform, which brings new machine learning and natural-language elements, as well as covers Mode 1 and Mode 2.  These key capabilities are critical to the next-generation of use cases.  To use Gartner’s own language, IBM Cognos Analytics covers all three modes of BI: Mode 1 (“formatted production-style reporting”), Mode 2 (“visual-based exploration and agility”), and Mode 3 (augmented analytics).

Our opinion is fueled by a bevy of positive analyst reports on Cognos Analytics 11.1.  Here’s a sample of what some of the leading firms have said:

• The July 2018 BARC Score Enterprise BI and Analytics Platforms report rated us as a “Market Leader” — the highest categorization given to any vendor.
• In November 2018, Krishna Roy of 451 Research wrote, “The result of development work carried out for over a year has turned Cognos Analytics into a compelling BI and analysis platform that hits all the market requirement and trends, including smart data discovery, augmented analytics, and automated predictive analysis.”
• Forrester Research identified us as a BI market leader even before all the improvements of 2018, noting that clients “gave IBM high scores for quick time-to-value, scalability, stability, security, cloud/hybrid architecture, extensibility, and frequency of upgrades.”
• The 2019 Ventana Research Analytics & BI Value Index report states: "IBM offers a comprehensive product line...for discovery, reporting, planning and predictive analytics [and] is one of the few vendors we evaluated to offer this breadth of functionality."

We agree with Gartner that the future is augmented analytics with AI.  IBM Watson Analytics lead the space and defined it.  By bringing IBM Watson Analytics capabilities into IBM Cognos Analytics 11.1, we’ve built a leading AI-infused BI platform, and we’re committed to building on the foundation we’ve established.  I’d like to encourage you to see for yourself the advances in Cognos Analytics 11.1.

Cognos Analytics has helped businesses excel with our industry-leading governance and reporting capabilities, and we should not be forgotten in the shine of the new data discovery vendors.  With 11.1, we infused compelling features and capabilities, each of which helps bring the power of AI-driven business intelligence to the everyday user.  Some of these new features include:

• New visual exploration capabilities, similar to features in Watson Analytics, that make it easy and intuitive for users, even those with no expertise in business analysis, to uncover compelling insights and hard-to-find answers
• The AI Assistant, which employs machine learning, natural language generation (NLG), and advanced pattern detection to convey hidden relationships in your data through stunning visualizations, plus distilled observations in plain English

• Incorporated additional advanced analytics features that make it faster and easier to discover not only what is happening, but why
• Made data preparation easier and faster, freeing up users to spend more of their time doing analysis
• Improved performance and user experience across the board

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