If we take a glance in the technology changes happened in last two years, we can directly say that ‘Reporting tools’ are doing a great part in business irrespective of the application (Whether it could be Cognos BI/ Qlikview/ Tableau etc)
Basically BI (Business Intelligence) tools are used by business users to create basic, medium and complex reports from the transactional data in data warehouse and by creating Universes using the Information Design Tool. Various SAP and non-SAP data sources can be used to create reports.
Let’s see the basic introduction of Cognos & its architecture. IBM Cognos Business Intelligence is a web based reporting and analytic tool. It is used to perform data aggregation and create user friendly detailed reports. Reports can contain graphs, multiple pages, different tabs and interactive prompts. Cognos also provides you an option to export the report in XML or PDF format or you can view the reports in XML format. You can also schedule the report to run in the background at specific time period so it saves the time to view the daily report as you don’t need to run the report every time.
IBM Cognos provides a wide range of features and can be considered as an enterprise software to provide flexible reporting environment and can be used for large and medium enterprises. It meets the need of power users, analysts, business managers and company executives. Cognos BI reporting allows you to bring the data from multiple databases into a single set of reports. IBM Cognos provides wide range of features as compared to other BI tools in the market. You can create and schedule the reports and complex report can be designed easily in the Cognos BI Reporting Tool.
Cognos BI is considered to be a 3-tier architecture layout. At the top, there is a web client or a web server. The 2nd tier consists of a web application server. While the bottom tier consists of a data layer. These tiers are separated by firewalls and communication between these tiers happens using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Fact is BI domain has been rapidly evolving and growing. A common statement one can hear from Many BI professionals that Cognos Reporting is a big player in Corporative BI Solutions and plenty of space to specialized work in it. Suggestions are there to broaden your perspective and invest some time in self-service BI (present in Cognos 11) in order to enrich your professional skills and consequently your value for the organization based only in the BI reporting activities.
Some professionals still mistakenly view Cognos experts as just ‘another IT job position’ and more often than not, price/value it accordingly. To use an analogy, there are lot of people that play a musical instrument play in a band and can happily entertain and please an audience. But there are just a few performers that can fill concert venues worldwide.
Considering the views, there will certainly be good work involved in traditional enterprise BI market like Cognos, but you need to be aware of this ever-changing BI landscape.