IBM® is one of the world’s largest vendors of IT hardware, software and services. The company has a global workforce of approximately 282,000 employees and is active across the globe. In 2007, IBM purchased the BI vendor Cognos and made their software the center of its BI & analytics product offerings.
IBM offers a broad portfolio of analytics, performance management and advanced analytics solutions to support its customers with their businesses and increase productivity. Its major offerings include IBM Cognos Analytics , IBM watsonx and IBM Cloud Pak for Data. IBM supports a wide range of deployment requirements by offering both cloud and on-premises options as well as the option of a client-preferred IaaS provider or IBM Cloud data centers (single or multi-tenant).
Cognos Analytics is IBM’s BI & analytics platform. Its functional strengths lie in enterprise reporting, self-service dashboards and AI-assisted analytics categories, combining ease of use with elaborate governance features in an end-to-end platform. The product can be used in large-scale scenarios supporting the needs of many concurrent users as well as large data volumes.
An important go-to-market message for IBM is that Cognos Analytics provides AI-powered insights faster and for every user. The vendor has incorporated NLQ, automated insights and intent-driven modeling and has invested in automation and ML capabilities across data modeling, dashboards, data exploration (‘Exploration’) and an analytics chat assistant. The Cognos Analytics assistant allows users to explore data by asking natural language questions and by receiving insightful answers with a presentation-ready dashboard or report. Cognos’ built-in ML capabilities can also identify trends and forecast results, helping companies to identify relevant influencers and correlations and calculate quick predictions.
IBM has also extended the advanced and predictive analytics capabilities of Cognos Analytics to bring business analyst and data scientist workloads together. For instance, Jupyter Notebooks has been incorporated in the user interface to provide greater flexibility in data preparation, statistical analysis and ML. The product also connects with IBM watsonx, the vendor’s advanced analytics platform targeted at data scientists and developers. Besides its widely known visual modeling capabilities, watsonx includes coding modules based on Jupyter Notebooks for development in R and Python, AutoML and embedded decision management. Watsonx also offers IBM’s proprietary Granite and third-party LLMs, along with the Prompt Lab and Tuning Studio components. Cognos Analytics can also be deployed as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data to enable many types of analytics use cases.
Customers seeking a solution to help business users access their analytics content in one place may find it in IBM Analytics Content Hub. This product is an OEM used by IBM to provide a central point of access not only to IBM’s products, such as IBM Cognos Analytics and IBM Planning Analytics, but also for third-party providers.
