Deliver Multi-Dimensional BI Data with IBM COGNOS

Deliver Multi-Dimensional BI Data with IBM COGNOS

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence is a web based analytic and reporting tool. It is used to generate user friendly detailed reports and perform data integration. Reports can include multiple pages, graphs, interactive prompts and different tabs. We can view these reports on web browsers and on devices like smartphones and tablets. An option to export the report in pdf or xml format or viewing the reports in xml format is provided by cognos. A report can also be scheduled to run in the background at a specified time so that it saves the time to observe the daily report as you need not run the report everytime.

IBM Cognos provides you with a wide variety of features and it is considered as an enterprise software to deliver flexible reporting environment and can be utilised for medium and large enterprises. It is used by analysts, power users, company executives and business managers. Analysts and power users want to generate adhoc reports and can build multiple views of the same data. Business Executives expect the summarize data in visualizations, cross tabs and dashboard styles. For all set of users, cognos enables both the options.

Key Features

Cognos BI enables you to get the data from various databases into a group of reports. In the present market, IBM Cognos delivers various features when compared with other BI tools. You can generate and organize the reports and complex reports can be easily designed in the Cognos BI reporting tool. It allows to generate a report for a group of users like business executives, analysts and power users. IBM Cognos can handle huge data and is suitable for large and medium enterprises to fulfil the needs of BI.

Architecture of Cognos

Cognos BI can be considered as a 3-tier architecture layout. There is a web server or web client at the top. The 2nd tier contains a web application server and the bottom layer contains a data layer. Firewalls separate all the 3 tiers and SOAP and HTTP protocols are utilised for communication between these tiers.

Tier-1 Web Clients

The wen client enables the users of BI to access the TM1 data and communicate with data in any one of the supporting browsers. Tier 1 holds the responsibility of managing the gateway and and is utilised for password encryption and decryption, get the information required for plea submission to the BI server, passing the plea to Cognos BI dispatcher for processing purpose and server authentication.

Tier-2 Web Application Server

Cognos BI server and its associated services are hosted by this tier. Application server consists of bootstrap service, content manager and application tier components. Apache Tomcat Server based on Java runs the Application Server. With this tier-2 application server, microsoft excel worksheets are transformed to TM1 web sheets and this tier allows to export the web sheets back to pdf and excel format.

Tier-3 Data

This tier consists of data sources and content. TM1 admin Server and at least one TM1 server are contained in this tier. The installation of TM1 Admin server can be carried out on any computer on the LAN and it must be in the same network where the TM1 server resides.

Strategy Management Process is automated by IBM Cognos BI Scorecarding

Image: https://www-01.ibm.com/software/in/analytics/cognos/business-intelligence/scorecarding.html

Around the world, 17,000 clients utilise cognos in about 120 countries. Cognos consultants can deliver real world, practical and valuable examples of how the cognos software is used on projects. Cognos training enables you take smarter business decisions by focusing on the real data and generates a self service interface for providing reports easily. Having basic knowledge in SQL and DBMS is the prerequisite for taking cognos training. This course caan promise a great career for IT professionals who are starting their careers as it is widely used by many companies around the world and there are a lot of job opportunities being generated due to the popularity of cognos.

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