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The Gartner Magic Quadrant is Worthless: Cognos Edition

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Be sure to check out an updated version of this blog post for the 2021 Magic Quadrant here!

Another February brings another edition of everyone’s favorite yearly head scratcher – the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence! I have expressed some strong opinions on the worth of the Magic Quadrant as a tool for decision makers in the past and this year will be no different. As always I strongly urge you to read the report rather than just rely on the picture as (once again) vendor positioning on the scatter plot feels extremely disconnected from the analysis contained below it. So let’s take a look at the 2020 Magic Quadrant as it relates to Cognos Analytics.

The 2020 Gartner magic quadrant for BI is much harsher to Cognos than their written analysis
IBM’s position and Gartner’s written analysis are out of sync

A big change to the Magic Quadrant this year is the return of enterprise reporting as key differentiator for what they are now calling ‘ABI platforms.’ The second differentiator is ‘augmented analytics’, which is integrated ML and AI assisted data prep and insight generation. Gartner is now calling visualization capabilities a commodity. What’s old is new again.

The return of enterprise reporting

This should be great news for Cognos Analytics! Cognos is a recognized leader in enterprise reporting. In fact Cognos’ reliance on enterprise reporting was the raison d’etre for knocking it out of the leaders quadrant to begin with.

It’s extremely curious, then, that IBM’s positioning on this quadrant was not more markedly improved. It’s even more curious that Gartner writes of enterprise reporting, ‘At present, these needs are commonly met by older BI products from vendors like…IBM (Cognos, pre-version 11)’. It’s almost as if Gartner is unaware that Cognos 11 meets the same enterprise reporting needs as previous versions. At the very least they seem unwilling to give IBM credit for it on the chart. The write-up tells a different story.

Augmented analytics gain steam

The second differentiator on the Magic Quadrant is also good news for Cognos. The platform’s augmented analytics capabilities have seen tremendous investment in the 11.1 release stream and are legitimately ahead of most vendors I have hands on experience with (Power BI, Tableau, Domo, Incorta being the primary ones.) Observe:

That’s a lot. If you want a comprehensive set of powerful, modern augmented analytics capabilities Cognos is a great choice.

The fact is that Cognos’ strength lines up perfectly with Gartner’s 2020 market differentiators, while it’s only ‘weakness’ – self-service visualization – is now considered a commodity. Again, why are they so poorly represented in the MQ image, and does the actual analysis tell a different story?

What does Gartner say about Cognos Analytics?

This write up is a lot rosier for IBM than the dismal MQ image suggests. I’ve summarized Gartner’s written analysis of IBM for you below:

Strengths

  • Cognos is one of the few offerings that offers all critical capabilities and differentiators in a single platform
  • IBM’s roadmap includes AI driven data prep, social media analytics and a long term goal of unifying self-service, enterprise reporting and planning (think Planning Analytics) in a single platform
  • Cognos can be deployed on-prem or in any cloud, unlike many other vendors

These significant strengths seem totally disconnected from where they have IBM placed on the quadrant. If enterprise reporting and augmented analytics are key differentiators between ABI platforms and Cognos is one of the only offerings that has it in a unified platform, how are they not better represented on the completeness of vision axis? Baffling!

Cautions

  • It is not often the sole enterprise standard
  • We think it costs more than other vendors
  • People don’t call us as much as they used to about Cognos

That last point is the key to unlocking the reality of how the Gartner Magic Quadrant for business intelligence really works. Let’s see why.

Gartner is a self-driven feedback loop

A huge component of ranking on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence is straight up how often prospective customers call them about various tools. They don’t call asking about Cognos very much, ergo Cognos has a poor ranking. Don’t believe me? Look at my analysis of their MQ for planning platforms to see how survey scores seemed to have no impact on their ranking of Oracle as the market leader – Oracle’s survey scores were horrible!

Ask yourself, would you call Gartner to discuss a BI tool they rank in the bottom third of vendors? You wouldn’t. You call Gartner to talk about Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik and (bafflingly) Thoughtspot. Otherwise you call someone else. As long as this remains a major criteria for ranking Gartner will remain a market distorting self-feedback mechanism.

By this same logic, Cognos is the world’s #1 business intelligence tool in the Ryan Dolley Magic Quadrant as it represents 90% of my calls!

Why the 2020 Magic Quadrant should make you feel good about IBM Cognos Analytics

The BI market is shifting once again. Visualization is a commodity, enterprise reporting is king and augmented analytics is on the rise. As I’ve outlined above, IBM Cognos Analytics’ feature set is extremely well positioned to thrive in the landscape Gartner describes, whether or not they recognize it. There simply is no platform that offers the total package of mode 1, mode 2 and augmented analytics like Cognos.

Want to further the conversation? Connect with me on LinkedIn and check out PMsquare’s website for help getting the most out of Cognos.

Read on to learn how to modernize Cognos and become your own leaders quadrant!

Site News: Mr. Blue joins IBM Premier Partner PMsquare

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A quick life update for you – I recently accepted a consultant position with IBM Premier Partner PMsquare. As many of you Cognos gurus know, early Summer 2015 marks the moment when Cognos recruiters fully emerged from their Great Recessionary slumber and began furiously hunting for fresh meat searching for new talent. I spoke with a number of very impressive potential employers but settled on PMsquare for three key reasons:

  1. An impressive collection of talent: PMsquare recently hired my A-number-one biggest Cognos crush, Paul Mendelson. The opportunity to work with him was too good to pass up, and the fact that PMsquare landed him over other, larger IBM Analytics partners impressed me. While out for beers with some of the team last week I realized that of the four people at the table I probably knew the least about Cognos. That was a seriously great feeling for me.
  2. They’ve been there before: While PMsquare is relatively new to the Cognos Consulting game much of the leadership and staff comes from Brightstar Partners. The company is new but these people are not noobs.
  3. Managing Partner Dustin Adkison owns a brewery: Yes, he did literally write a book on Cognos, but more important than that Dustin Adkison is a part owner of Cahoots Brewing in Chicago, IL. People who love Cognos and beer are my kind of people.

What does this mean for IBM Blueview? Nothing. The site remains a personal project unaffiliated with IBM, PMsquare or anything else. I will continue to provide you with all the hot takes on IBM Cognos, Watson Analytics and whatever the future holds.

Cognos?! Who Needs Cognos When You’ve Got a Watson!

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NOTE: This diatribe was originally posted January 29th, 2015 at my old blogger domain. Since then I have in fact gotten a demonstration of Watson Analytics in the hands of a highly skilled presenter and was fairly impressed with the tool. IBM still needs to outline their vision for the integration of Watson into Cognos but you can fairly say of this post: “Foot, prepare to meet Mr. Mouth…”

 

IBM held a webinar today (January 29th, 2015) titled “IBM Watson Analytics for IBM Cognos Users. Here is my run down of what Big Blue had to show:

  • Watson is an unstoppable beast… in slide decks: Every time I see a Watson presentation the visualizations look great and the marketing speak makes it sound like a game changer. However I have yet to see an actual demonstration of the damn thing.
  • Cognos sure sounds boring: IBM gets positively tired whenever the conversation shifts to Cognos. You can tell how unexcited they are to sell things like “trusted source of data.” Who needs trust when you’ve got a sweet graph!
  • The Watson – Cognos integration does not exist: As per the slide deck, the current integration point between the two is that you take what you learned in Watson and send an email to someone in IT asking them to change something in Cognos to match your new insight. Awesome.

I had high(er) hopes for this presentation. Given the title I was expecting to see IBM’s vision for how Watson and Cognos exist in an analytics ecosystem, or at least an outline of some integration points between the two. IBM had nothing to say about Cognos though other than to acknowledge its existence, which… whatever. Just another wasted opportunity from Big Blue so par for the course.

More than anything I’d like them to actually demonstrate Watson in the hands of a highly skilled presenter. Because, as you’ll see in a future post, my experience with the Watson “freemium edition” is less than stellar…

We Need To Talk: The Blue View Manifesto

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We need to talk.

I am continuously surprised at the lack of strong IBM Cognos community content available on the web. With a few notable exceptions Cognos blogs burn bright, die fast and leave a handful of good posts slowly aging into obsolescence.

If you have made a career in Cognos this is a critical time. Cognos can do data discovery, visualization, self-service and collaboration but even IBM seems to lack a holistic vision to stitch it together.  Or else True Blue and the business partners are content to keep it behind the consulting pay wall.

That’s a huge problem. That’s the old world that Tableau and Birst have been sent here to destroy. Yes the new breed of BI tools are powerful and cool and excel in their particular niche, but more than anything they foster a user community that feels connected to one another. Last time I checked Tableau’s forum had over 18,000 posts. Where is IBM’s forum?

That’s a trick question because it doesn’t matter. A software community can only be formed and sustained by a group of people who have knowledge and the passion to share it. The deeply technical how-to’s and the holistic design philosophies have already been crafted by the army of talented Cognos developers.

We just need to talk about it.

So let’s start now.