Metadata has long been an essential part of every successful organization’s analytics strategy. In this article, I sat down with two of Ironside’s foremost experts on the topic to discuss its origin and value and how two of the industry’s leading vendors in the analytics space address this core capability in a bimodal analytics world.
Susan Ma and Suresh Edara are both long-time Ironside consultants with deep expertise in top BI toolsets: Microsoft and Cognos.
Read moreIn the first installment of our series on bimodal analytics, we talked about the origins of Mode 2 analytics. We looked at some of the challenges around implementing true bimodal analytics within IBM Cognos Analytics 11 and touched on some of the vendors who were born as Mode 2 platforms. This second installment will focus specifically on how to enable Mode 2 analytics within the organization using Cognos.
Read moreEarlier today the AWS team unveiled two new capabilities for QuickSight, Amazon’s signature Business Intelligence tool. Speaking live from the AWS re:Invent conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas, the four hosts announced the ability for users to easily embed QuickSight dashboards in applications and previewed new native Machine Learning capabilities. Read more
Last week at Analytics University, IBM formally announced the release of the next major version of Cognos Analytics, v11.1.
IBM has hinted at the inclusion of “smarts” for “augmented analytics” and improvements in the usability of this new version over the past year. Our expectation was that these improvements would continue to “modernize” Cognos and help address some of the competitive pressures that organizations with legacy investments have been encountering in recent years. Read more
Well in advance of the IBM acquisition of Cognos, the Cognos name was synonymous with powerful, trusted enterprise business intelligence and managed reporting. Between its ability to scale to meet the needs of the largest enterprises, its robust, governed metadata layer that made it possible to report against a vast array of different data sources, powerful reporting capabilities churning out highly complex managed BI reporting solutions, and ad-hoc reporting and analysis against those governed data sources, IBM Cognos was the answer for almost all enterprise reporting needs. Until it wasn’t.
Read moreMaintaining system availability is an important aspect of every Cognos Analytics administrator’s job. Monitoring your Cognos Analytics environment is a key part of maintaining this availability. You’re likely already monitoring the IBM Cognos service for Start/Stopped status, but this doesn’t always give an accurate representation of what’s going on with your servers. Often times, a user will report that Cognos isn’t available but the service is running. What else can you do? Fortunately, Cognos Analytics provides some informative URLs you can use to check the status of your content managers and dispatchers. Read more
The last several years have represented an interesting journey for organizations and teams leveraging Cognos for analytics. During that time, visual data discovery tools have made a significant impact. However, as of late, we have seen the pendulum swing back to concepts introduced by enterprise BI tools long ago.¹ What’s old is new again.
When these new tools arrived, they challenged both the status quo and what many of us saw as an ideal solution to the localized, ungoverned, manually-intensive, and often error-prone data manipulation (i.e. “shadow analytics”) processes of the past. If we think back to the dawn of the modern business intelligence age in the mid 1990’s, we realize that these challenges are what tools like Cognos were developed to solve. Read more
When looking at authentication options for applications, integration and single sign on – especially for different web-based apps in an organization – there are a few standards to be considered. Initially, there was SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) which is an open standard for authorization and authentication and primarily used for single sign on (SSO) for enterprise apps. Next was OAuth2, or open standard for authorization, which was used for API Authorization. And finally, OpenID Connect, which is a combination of SAML and OAuth2. It’s an open standard for authentication, whose primary use is SSO for consumer apps. Read more
Last week, Ironside’s partner Pitney Bowes, issued a press release announcing the global launch of its new Software & Data Marketplace. We believe that accessibility to Pitney Bowes data will be valuable to our clients as they will be able to source and process data from multiple providers in the same applications, leading to easier analysis and collaboration of data points. Read more
When dealing with a Cognos environment there are a lot of moving parts, especially in a multi-server environment. For instance, there is the Application server, the Dispatcher, the Gateway, the Database server, and so on. This isn’t even including the general IT infrastructure components like the network, VPN and firewall. One component that tends to get overlooked is the Web Server. Read more
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