Cognos to Power BI Paginated Reports Migration

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1 Cognos to Power BI Paginated Reports Migration Learn how migrating to Power BI can be beneficial to your organization Business Intelligence (BI) reporting refers to the process of receiving or providing information in the form of reports to end-users, organizations, or applications through a BI solution. These reports can be in the form of statistical data, visual charts, and standard textual content. BI reporting tools enable businesses to visualize and present data that can be easily accessed and analyzed. The BI market is overcrowded, with most reporting tools offering standard features/similar functionalities like security, production, distribution, deployment, and support. However, while choosing the right BI reporting tool, the differentiating factors include ease of usability, report quality, scalability, and performance. Businesses are quickly beginning to realize the advantages that visualizations have over standard representations of data. Understanding data visualization can radically improve business intelligence, streamline work processes, and, most importantly, help make datadriven business decisions faster. Several data visualization tools are available today, which offer a range of visualizations that cater to different business needs. Some even allow users to customize the look & feel and data representation. One of the leading innovative tools available for data analysis and visualization is Power BI. Ref:

2 Power BI has become one of the most viable investment options for businesses looking to convert their data into opportunities. Power BI makes visual dashboard creation simple and intuitive with visualization options, also offers the flexibility to enhance its out-of-the-box visualization capabilities. Cognos Cognos is a leading enterprise reporting solution that enables users to create reports, analyze their data, and gather valuable business insights. IBM acquired Cognos in Benefits Cognos architecture is structured and calibrated for optimal performance. This allows enterprises to scale the app to support their growing user base. With Integration of IBM s SPSS, it offers predictive and statistical capabilities to end-users. Cognos uses an open architecture that leverages XML, SOAP, and WSDL. Multilingual capabilities automatically deliver reports in the users native language. Limitations The initial setup isn't as simple as running the installer and activating it. Adjustments to the server setup may be necessary before it is up and running. Browser support can be tricky. Compatibility is best with Internet Explorer, but specific browser setting changes can cause issues. Other browsers' compatibility can be questionable due to their significantly more frequent updates. It works best with actual databases and not so well with CSV or other file formats. An ODBC or JDBC driver can be used to treat files like databases, but native support is somewhat limited. Using external ODBC drivers can be done with 32-bit drivers only. Having a sandbox environment on a developer's machine isn't feasible due to how Cognos installs on a system. Why migrate from Cognos to Power BI Paginated Reports? Due to ever-changing business needs and obsolete technologies, organizations are compelled to move from one reporting format to another. There are multiple reasons why enterprises may want to move from Cognos to Power BI Paginated reports. Each suite has its strengths and weaknesses. On balance, there is probably not enough of a rationale on either side to migrate from one to the other, unless addressing specific business needs. Check out this whitepaper ( to understand some of the reasons businesses may choose to migrate Cognos reports and learn Cognos & Power BI, which gives better ROI?

3 Conclusion The key differentiating factor between Power BI and Cognos is the cost and availability of trained resources. Licensing for Microsoft is determined on the server instance model, also a user-based model offering flexibility, whereas Cognos licensing is dependent on the number of users. Although the Microsoft BI tool stack offers a quality BI solution, you cannot undermine the enterprise capabilities of IBM Cognos.