TM1 Forum

I'm new to Cognos and TM1 and would like someone to help me navigate thru the different products and the main differences (if any) between them. Please don't send me to IBM website as I have been there already and got confused by the way they present their solutions and I'm sure it's a a marketing thing as well. The various applications/products I already encountered in my research are:
IBM Cognos 10
IBM Cognos Express
IBM Cognos 8 (Planning)
(IBM Cognos) TM1
(IBM Cognos 8) Controller
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

And also saw:
IBM Cognos Now!
IBM Cognos Finance

Thanks!

nholtzsh wrote:I'm new to Cognos and TM1 and would like someone to help me navigate thru the different products and the main differences (if any) between them. Please don't send me to IBM website as I have been there already and got confused by the way they present their solutions and I'm sure it's a a marketing thing as well. The various applications/products I already encountered in my research are:
IBM Cognos 10
IBM Cognos Express
IBM Cognos 8 (Planning)
(IBM Cognos) TM1
(IBM Cognos 8) Controller
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

And also saw:
IBM Cognos Now!
IBM Cognos Finance

Thanks!

Heres my take on what you have listed up there as we own all of the products except for Controller and Express (If you own the BI suite at an Enterprise level you can't even purchase Express).

IBM Cognos 10:
Just a general reference to the latest release number of the products. Almost all of the products are at a version number 10 or higher

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence:
This is the Enterprise level Business Intelligence Suite that allows for reporting, dashboarding, self service report building, etc.

IBM Cognos Planning:
This is one of the Enterprise level planning software offerings. It is the older of the two and the architecture is file based development, web-based front end with database backend client. An excel add in is also provided but is not as good as TM1 in my opinion. Highly scalable for user counts as calculations are performed on the client machine. Not nearly as scalable as TM1 for cube size and flexibility.

IBM TM1:
This is the other Enterprise level planning software offereing. It is the newer of the two and the architecture is RAM memory OLAP cubes with server side calculations and web based thin client front end. An excel add in is provided as well. Newer versions are much more scalable for users than prior versions and it's cube sizes are only limited by RAM memory. Very high performance on larger data sets and very flexible with automation and scripting.

IBM Controller:
This is the Corporate Financial Consolidation software that often competes with Hyperion. Provides capabilities to consolidate financials from multiple companies and disparate general ledgers, etc.

IBM Cognos Express:
A small to midsize company offering of Cognos BI and Cognos TM1/Cognos Planning depending on the version of express you have. It is basically the full enterprise version except that in most cases you are limited by user count. It is also typically cheaper than purchasing the other products in modules.

IBM Cognos Now:
Is a real time data product that can allow for dashboarding, reporting, analytics, etc of real time data. Used to be appliance based but now is software based I believe.

IBM Cognos Finance:
I might be wrong here but IBM Cognos Finance is like a smaller version of Business Intelligence but dedicated to Financial Reporting and performance management. Not quite as many universal features as BI as it is directed at financials. Again I don't know all that much about this product.

IBM Cognos Viewpoint:
Dimension managment software that allows web based workflow. End users can essentially add, delete, change items within dimensions and then start an approval workflow which can automatically promote dimension changes to production.

IBM SPSS:
Statistical software used for analytics and predictive modeling/forecasting etc.

There is one more product that I can think of that IBM recently purchased, Clarity. Im not sure what the new IBM name will be but it deals with Financial Reporting for public companies mostly. International reporting consolidations for 10k, 10Q etc.

Hopefully this helps a little and others please correct me if I have missed anything.

nholtzsh what are you actually looking to use the products for?

Saying that you are new to TM1 would indicate that you probably only need to be interested in the differences between TM1 and Cognos Express (Cognos Express allows you to have 1 instance of TM1 and a max of 100 clients... its 1 version behind TM1 so does pretty much everything you need (if one instance is enough) and is a fair bit cheaper.) If you are interested in Cognos as a whole... I am sure you will be able to get a lot of info from people here but this forum really is aimed more at TM1.

Anyway PlanningDev has given you a good overview of all products but if you specifically let us know what your intentions are we may be able to give you a bit more detail?



I also failed to mention that TM1 can obviously link into some other Cognos products to "pull" data or show it in a reporting format in another system... but again it depends what you intend to use it for.

Good overview but some clarifications

PlanningDev wrote: Heres my take on what you have listed up there as we own all of the products except for Controller and Express (If you own the BI suite at an Enterprise level you can't even purchase Express).

You can purchase Cognos Express even if you have other Enterprise Cognos products but you are not licensed to link the 2. eg you cannot use Enterprise Cognos BI to report from Cognos Express TM1 cubes (or ICAS cubes in CX jargon). However, your IBM account manager may well tell you otherwise because they don't want to sell CX at about a third of the price.

PlanningDev wrote: IBM Cognos 10:
Just a general reference to the latest release number of the products. Almost all of the products are at a version number 10 or higher

Apart from TM1 and Cognos Express

PlanningDev wrote: IBM TM1:
This is the other Enterprise level planning software offereing. It is the newer of the two and the architecture is ... web based thin client front end. An excel add in is provided as well.

Traditionally TM1 has had its sweet spot in finance and end user departments who normally use Excel (or Excel websheets via TM1 web) as the primary user interface. However the current IBM demos and sales people from the former Cognos community tend to focus on the Controller web thin client, probably because this is more like they are used to from the old Cognos Planning product. This ignore strength and and flexibility of the TM1 Excel interface.

PlanningDev wrote: IBM Cognos Express:
A small to midsize company offering of Cognos BI and Cognos TM1/Cognos Planning depending on the version of express you have. It is basically the full enterprise version except that in most cases you are limited by user count. It is also typically cheaper than purchasing the other products in modules.

Four modules: ( see previous posts for more detail)
- Reporter, Cut down Cognos BI
- Xcelerator, full function TM1
- Advisor, the old Temtec Executive Viewer, browser based cube viewer and graphic visualisation
- Planner, CX version of TM1 Contributor module ( Not Cognos Planning)
in most cases Cognos Express is simply a cheap way to buy TM1.

PlanningDev wrote: IBM Cognos Finance:
I might be wrong here but IBM Cognos Finance is like a smaller version of Business Intelligence but dedicated to Financial Reporting and performance management. Not quite as many universal features as BI as it is directed at financials. Again I don't know all that much about this product.

I think this is the predecessor to Cognos Controller, formerly called Lex 2000 and used for Financial\Statutory consolidations. When Cognos bought Frango and renamed it Controller this superseded Lex 2000\Cognos finance though I beleive there are still some users out there.

PlanningDev wrote: There is one more product that I can think of that IBM recently purchased, Clarity. Im not sure what the new IBM name will be but it deals with Financial Reporting for public companies mostly. International reporting consolidations for 10k, 10Q etc.

Clarity was the company which had a budgeting product ( Clarity 7?)that has been flatlined by IBM and a financial reporting product, now called Cognos FSR (Financial Statement Reporting) which is being pushed very heavily. Although originally aimed at public companies I think there is a wider use for any organisation that needs to combined numbers ( eg spreadsheets, consolidation system) , text ( eg commentary from Word documents) and graphics in a controlled and automated environment. Can also be used for monthly management reporting, iXBRL tagging etc.

Hope this helps

Thanks everyone!
More questions to come

nholtzsh wrote:More questions to come

Ok but lets hope they are TM1 specific and not just a short cut to impressing your customers with apparent knowledge of Cognos TM1 and the rest of the product suite

That was not my intent (and I'm not a sales person), so if there is another forum that I can use to ask more generic questions about IBM products that are not TM1 specific, I would be more than happy to get the link. Don't want to waste anyone's time or to bother any of you if this is not the right place to ask those kind of questions............

nholtzsh wrote:That was not my intent (and I'm not a sales person), so if there is another forum that I can use to ask more generic questions about IBM products that are not TM1 specific, I would be more than happy to get the link. Don't want to waste anyone's time or to bother any of you if this is not the right place to ask those kind of questions............

Ask away; nobody has to answer it. I don't think that Stephen was having a go at you. It's just that sometimes consultants (whether they be sales or technical consultants) sell their services while lacking the skills, training, experience or even aptitude to do so. The only thing that they have to offer is a cut price rate, which undercuts people who have put in the hard yards to learn the product. Instead they come running to forums like this one (and this isn't a TM1-specific problem, it happens with all software) and try to get the very same people that they're trying to take work from (without being qualified to do so) to help them do that very thing.

Nobody gets irritated (or nobody should get irritated, perhaps I should say) with new /potential new end users who are just trying to get a handle on where things sit in a broader context, but the sort of thing referred to above does get noses out of joint, and with good reason. I think Stephen was just making the point that people are happy to help as long as it's for the right reasons. Although that having been said, this particular forum is generally the one to go to for TM1-centric questions; once you start getting away from TM1 specifically and into other products as well it might be time to head on up to the General forum unless it's a tool covered in one of the Other OLAP Tools forums.

Makes perfectly sense and well appreciated. Thx!