Cognos PowerPlay Review

OLAP REPORT REVIEW: COGNOS POWERPLAY 7.3

Author: Nigel Pendse Released: 2005 Pages: 37 Single User Price: $895 USD An in-depth product evaluation and rating PowerPlay takes a back-step as Cognos focuses more on enterprise reporting and planning. Companies aiming to standardize on a common suite of business intelligence systems could find that Cognos offers them an attractive option. The company stands out in the marketplace as one of the few vendors able to provide solutions that fulfil the need for a single source of the full range of business intelligence applications. While this 37-page review focuses on PowerPlay, the vendor's generic OLAP tool, it discusses its fit with the full suite of Cognos business intelligence systems. The review also allows you to compare PowerPlay with comparable products from Business Objects and Hyperion, who with Cognos represent the three largest independent business intelligence vendors. The OLAP Report review explains in detail why PowerPlay is neither the most powerful nor the most simplest OLAP tool available, nor the cheapest. It also shows where it has edge over the competition, particularly in respect of its significant degree of integration with other business intelligence products in the Cognos suite. While far from complete, this integration means that PowerPlay shares a number of important features and functionality with other Cognos products. Use this review to see how PowerPlay rates across the whole spectrum of 23 criteria. In particular, see how it compares with other products in relation to: Exception reporting - limited or missing from some other products Multi-user capabilities - more manually intensive than some other products Strong application building capabilities - plus pre-built applications. Also, check out its comparative strength as a company, its extensive international presence and local support. A sample of the numerous specially generated screenshots from this review. Click to enlarge.

Contents: Vendor overview Company background Revenues Market share Product commercial issues Pricing Database structure and capacity Architecture and platforms Clients Servers Data access functionality Drill-through Third-party cube access Calculation functionality Reporting flexibility Web access Cognos Visualizer Automatic detection of exceptions Time series intelligence Currency support Security and DBMS issues End-user human factors Application building features Performance Conclusions and scores Ask a question about this product? Other customers also purchased: BusinessObjects Review Cognos Planning Review Multidimensional Reporting Analysis Email a colleague about this product

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