Smart to the core

Users often know which data they want, but not where to find it. That’s why an integral part of Cognos Analytics is its powerful guided search function , which uses natural language processing so users can search using common terminology tohelp them find the right data across multiple sources. This function uses a powerful, fast and scalable search engine that requires no administration and is always up-to-date.

Thanks to smart features like these, business users can quickly find or upload the data they need, use built-in intelligence for guided visual data exploration, then create great-looking dashboards, reports and infographics to highlight new insights. All these features are designed to make finding analytic insights faster, easier and more accessible. This helps individual business users do their jobs better, but perhaps the most important effect is on training and human capital at an organizational level. By empowering individual users, guided BI frees up your IT department to focus on high-value activities instead of having to serve as a gatekeeper for every analytics request coming from business users.

Easily prepare your data with data modules

Within Cognos Analytics, users can easily combine data from different sources into reusable components called data modules. These allow a business user to shape, merge, join and customize data into an efficient, shareable form that can then be used to create visualizations in dashboards, reports and stories. You can fuse together many sources of data such as Framework Manager packages, relational databases and Hadoop-based technologies, along with your own spreadsheets and external data.

Cognos Analytics has intelligent capabilities, including intent-driven modeling which helps users to create data modules accurately and efficiently. For example, when you enter keywords into the Search bar, the text from column and table names in the underlying data sources are retrieved by the Cognos Analytics software. From there, the intent field has a type-ahead list that suggests terms that are found in the source metadata.

An interactive diagram of the table relationships within a data module helps users understand how data sources connect to one another. More than just a visual aid, the diagram allows you to perform joins and other actions on the tables interactively by shifting items on the screen.

Data modules can be customized to present information in ways that will be most easily understood by your audience, for instance by using the terms, data groupings, metadata and formatting that are most relevant to that business group. Saved data modules can also be used as data sources for other data modules so that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Explore your data with fantastic visuals that add layers of meaning

Create great-looking visualizations in a wide variety of chart types , taking advantage of new features like embedded geospatial mapping capabilities, color palette customization, new visualization types and better-looking visualizations with optional data labels. The new user interface makes it much simpler to drag and drop your data onto the canvas; the system automatically chooses the best visualization based on the type of data. Visualizations make use of the next generation of the Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine, called RAVE2, and more new visualization types are being added with each release.

RAVE2 delivers improved visualization capabilities for your dashboards and reports, including such features as heat maps and pan-and-zoom. It also supports the latest innovations in geospatial mapping, with resolution down to the ZIP code level. The system even creates maps automatically when it detects tables of geographic information such as street addresses or GPS coordinates.

Share your data with click of a button

As a Cognos BI user, you’ve invested over the years in the software, infrastructure and training to build analytics into your business processes. Now you can bring forward all of that vital content—data models, reports, dashboards, metadata and more—into Cognos Analytics to gain even more value as you create interactive reports faster and easier than ever before.

The Report Studio feature has been upgraded with new capabilities; you can use, maintain and enhance reports built in previous releases, or author new reports using the combined capabilities of Report Studio and Cognos Workspace Advanced.

Among many other enhancements, the new geospatial mapping feature allows you to perform geographic analysis of data using locations such as states, regions and postal codes. You can even create maps with layers of information in them, for example by showing states colored by total population, and the cities within those states as points sized by population and colored by the average age of residents.

The new interactive filter panel in Cognos Analytics gives readers of a report additional flexibility so they can understand the context of the report without consulting its author. They can click toolbar icons to sort, filter, drill through to another report, create calculations or select and interact with specific elements of a chart. Report creators can also embed custom JavaScript commands that can be shared and reused among many reports.

Analytics where you need it: on-premises or on cloud

With Cognos Analytics, you can choose how you want to deploy business intelligence capabilities based on time, costs and resources. Both the Cognos Analytics software and the data it uses can be located on-premise or in the cloud based on your organization’s needs. You can design the best mix of on-premise and cloud-based data sources, with no need to move or duplicate your data.

Cognos Analytics can be purchased as a fully managed BI solution, delivered as a service on a per user/per month subscription, with multiple options for price and scale. It provides:

• Full BI capabilities, from self-service analysis to advanced
• Support from IBM professionals to manage infrastructure, patching and upgrades
• Support for a mix of cloud-based and on-premise data sources
• Tiered subscription as a service
• Disaster recovery and content backup

Only IBM has the unique combination of competencies to deliver an enterprise-grade cloud-based BI application with the full support and services to make your organization successful.

In addition, IBM offers a Bridge to Cloud option for existing Cognos Business Intelligence customers that currently have on-premise deployments. It enables them to take advantage of the agility and flexibility of a new cloud deployment while preserving their existing data security environment. When you “bridge” your on-premise license to a Cognos Analytics on Cloud subscription, you get all the advantages of a cloud-based application while preserving your data wherever it is: on the cloud, on premise or both.

Bridge to Cloud also allows customers to move to the cloud in a staged approach. It offers a specified transition period during which customers pay a single price but are fully enabled to use on-premise data along with a fully functional cloud system. With this setup, customers can immediately launch new projects on the cloud while they prepare to migrate existing projects.

Coming soon: even more smart functionality

For the data explorer who’s obsessed with knowing their data better than anyone else, finding the answers that no one else can find, and delivering the most compelling data stories, the enhancements coming to IBM Cognos Analytics will deliver a personal analytics experience for the enterprise that’s designed to make you the smartest person in the room. In short, we’re putting “Smarts” at the core of everything we do, giving you the ability to:

Find answers that no one else can find
- Advanced pattern detection and machine learning reveal relationships and patterns in the data that may not be evident
- Helps eliminate analysis blind spots, guesswork and fruitless searching by surfacing and identifying data relationships in context, based on your recent interactions
- Delivers more accurate results and presents statistical information and insights about the selected visualization in natural language
Create stunning, unexpected visualizations, reports and dashboards
- Recommends the most useful visualization for your selected data
- Natural language narration highlights and summarizes trends and insights in business language
Change the way you work with data
- Enables conversations with data using natural language that identifies relationships between concepts and data associations
- Presents recommendations for data sources, data joins and visualizations with multi-stage recommendation system
- Leverages sophisticated machine learning to track actions and remember user levels and preferred visualizations

Get Started: Upgrading is easy when you follow a plan

The upgrade process has been designed expressly for painless migration at enterprise scale . Your IT team will benefit from an easily understood path to implement the latest version of Cognos Analytics, either on-premise or on the cloud, and your business end users will enjoy a seamless transition from Cognos Business Intelligence to the advanced functionality of Cognos Analytics.

There are four stages to the field-tested upgrade workflow that is included within the installation and configuration guide:

• Prepare: Create an upgrade plan
• Validate: Create a test or development system
• Execute: Create a quality assurance (QA) or production system
• Leverage: Adopt new features

Find more information and resources to assist you in your upgrade at Upgrade Central.

Lifecycle Manager is a standalone application that helps validate and compare report outputs within a single environment, or between different versions of Cognos software. You can use it to make your upgrade process even easier by dividing the project into separate tasks that cover different sets of reports. Lifecycle Manager supports Cognos 8.4.x, Cognos 10.1.x, Cognos 10.2.x and Cognos 11.0.x as source environments, and is available on both Windows and Linux