vs. Cognos

MicroStrategy 9

• Homegrown Single Platform: MicroStrategy’s single code base offers reusable business logic across the entire BI platform. For example, MicroStrategy’s dashboards can be made from existing reports and objects, speeding development and ensuring consistency of report logic across reports and dashboards.
• Single Server and Centralized Administration: MicroStrategy’s single BI server provides efficient, centralized administration for the IT administrator. A single server with fewer moving parts and processes translates into less downtime.

IBM Cognos 8.4

• Multiple Platforms and Metadata Repositories: Cognos Metrics Studio uses a separate repository from Cognos BI. Cognos PowerPlay Cubes require their own definition through Transformer. Cognos’ recent acquisitions—Celequest and Applix—represent stand alone platforms without plans for integration with Cognos BI beyond their use as external data sources.
• Five Different User Interfaces: Cognos BI has five different products called “Studios”. These “Studios” contain overlapping functionality, requiring users to learn different paradigms. This lowers user adoption rates and increases IT support costs.

MicroStrategy 9

• Single Reusable Metadata Repository: MicroStrategy’s object-oriented metadata defines your enterprise’s business layer in a single repository. Metadata objects can be nested as building blocks to create more complex objects. If a metadata object changes, every other dependent object automatically changes.
• Dynamic SQL Engine: MicroStrategy assembles all metadata objects necessary for a report such as set qualifications, dimensional calculations, and custom groupings and dynamically builds the report SQL at run-time without requiring manual SQL coding.

IBM Cognos 8.4

• Report Designers Cannot Create Metadata to Reuse across Reports: In Cognos, report designers using Report Studio cannot create report objects e.g., metrics, filters, prompts, custom groups and then reuse these objects across different reports.
• Thin Metadata Layer: Cognos’ metadata maps one-to-one to the physical database on what is called a Cognos Query Item. Report developers select Query Items to include in a report. If an attribute like ‘Region’ happens to be in two database tables, report developers are forced to choose between two ‘Region’ Query Items, potentially resulting in two "versions of the truth".

MicroStrategy 9

• Single Point of Monitoring and Administration: MicroStrategy provides a single centralized console for real-time user and system management and an out-of-the box BI environment monitoring application.
• Robust Life Cycle Management: MicroStrategy Object Manager facilitates metadata life cycle management, automatic dependency checking, and project management.
• Advanced In-Memory Optimization Tools: MicroStrategy Cube Advisor recommends and automatically creates an optimal set of in-memory ROLAP cubes to optimize database queries and accelerate response time.

IBM Cognos 8.4

• Limited Monitoring and Administration: Cognos provides very limited out-of-the-box dashboards, reports and KPIs to perform impact analysis, auditing and tuning of the BI application.
• Incomplete Life Cycle Management: Cognos offers limited auditing capabilities and tools to assist usage and metadata management.
• Insufficient In-Memory Optimization Tools: Cognos does not provide any tool to recommend optimized in-memory ROLAP cubes.

MicroStrategy 9

• Centralized and Pervasive Security: MicroStrategy provides centralized security administration across the entire platform.
• Automatic Levels of Functionality and Data Access: Reusable user profiles and privileges automatically ensure users only access the appropriate information and functionality down to the data cell level.
• Pervasive 128-Bit Encryption: MicroStrategy supports 128-bit end-to-end encryption with a zero-footprint web client, making it a secure platform behind the firewall, and ideal for extranet deployments.

MicroStrategy 9

• Native Support for Multilingual Deployments: MicroStrategy automatically translates the report descriptions, user interface, metadata objects, error messages and data into local languages without any IT design or maintenance effort.
• Integrated Translation Interfaces and Wizards: Translation wizards and interfaces make it easy for end users to input or import translation strings into the metadata. Translations can be performed incrementally; fallback language settings allow for partially translated metadata.

MicroStrategy 9

• Single and Flexible Development Environment: MicroStrategy’s single Web interface, single server and single code base provide a unified development environment for the whole platform. No need to learn multiple SDKs.
• Eclipse IDE-Ready Web Customization Editor: The MicroStrategy Web Customization Editor integrates into the Eclipse IDE. Developers easily perform MicroStrategy Web customization and migration tasks without tedious manual configuration.