Cognos express

IBM Cognos Express is a business intelligence and planning platform with integrated Reporting, Analysis, Planning and Budgeting modules, offered by IBM for mid-sized companies.
It is a pre-configured out-of-the-box BI platform, easy to deploy, manage and requires a minimum IT involvement.
The platform is based on the TM1 OLAP in-memory engine, ensuring efficient response times and administration and security is provided by the central management console.

Cognos Express limitations

The main limitations of Cognos Express versus Cognos 8 BI are:

  • Cognos Express can be only single host with limited PVU
  • Cognos Express installation is limited to 100 users
  • Lack of the Go!Mobile and Go!Search modules
  • Limited connectivity to the ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, etc.)
  • Cognos 8 BI has much broader security, authorization and access control capabilities
  • Cognos 8 BI is available on Windows, Linux and most Unix systems, where the Cognos Express is Windows only
  • In terms of usage and user experience it has the same limitations as Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix TM1)

    IBM Cognos Express components


    The IBM Cognos Express platform is based on 4 products which are implemented (and sold) as separate modules:

  • Express Xcelerator - Microsoft Excel based planning and business analysis tool, which implements a powerful in-memory analytics engine for OLAP analysis, reporting and planning. The Xcelerator can be accessed with an Excel interface or Web. It provides what-if analysis, write back capabilities and workflow management.
  • Express Reporter - reporting and ad-hoc query tool, connects to a variety of data sources (relational, OLAP and desktop files), can be used to create operational reports, ad-hoc queries and dashboards. Reports created with reporter can be delivered via web, email, made available on the Portal or send out as PDF or Excel.
  • Express Advisor - real-time adhoc analysis and visualization tool based on the in-memory multidimensional model which can be embedded into Microsoft Office applications. Advisor provides analysis interface, lets users create what-if models and allows standard OLAP operations like drill down, slice and dice and data filtering.
  • Express planner - planning, budgeting and forecasting application which provides a set of templates, real-time engine and automated workflows.

    Cognos Express modeling tools

    Cognos express provides a couple of metadata modeling tools, where all of those tools have their correspondents in the enterprise application.

      The Cognos Express modeling tools are:
    • Reporter uses Framework Manager for publishing packages in the same way as in the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
    • Xcelerator uses models created in TM1 Architect and Xcelerator client (TM1 and TM1WEB)
    • Advisor is based on models created with the TM1 Executive Viewer data advisor