Great post. Having lived through many of these evolutions, I keep coming back to Steve Jobs talking about disintermediation. Its better for you to disintermediate yourself than have a competitor do it. Everyone knows this inherently but it is almost impossible to do in the moment. How can you risk killing your cash cow? How can you do it in the face of a massive installed base? Satya Nadella famously did this with Microsoft and Azure, but so many companies kicked the hard decision down the road and paid dearly for it. Oracle and IBM should have major players in the Cloud. Teradata should have been a player in Cloud Data Warehousing. I could list a hundred examples. One thing about technology--it's never a dull time, and the only constant is change.
That's an excellent point. I had a front row seat to IBMs attempts to become a cloud player. They had some good ideas and tech, but clearly it didn't work out.
Great observations. I was a PowerBuilder expert in the '00s, back when you could earn $150/hr with it. That tool eventually died, but the skills I gained at relational database design and query performance kept my career afloat.
Ugh. I had a long comment but then substack made me login and I lost it. Long story short, I think you nailed it on MS. They will never lead but will constantly be lurking. Curious to see who, if anyone, truly becomes the new leader. Or if it fragments as orgs choose different tools based on what’s best for them and their data culture.
Great observation and things change and remain the same. There was a push for BICC, COE and dreaded "self-service" Analytics. Then BOBJ (webi, Xcelcius, Lumira, IDT and so forth) and cognos came. For SAP BW then BW/HANA came, there was an intermittent flow of sas taking over analytics. In the end as far as business folks only have power to understand line and graph charts with colors these tools will keep coming and going. The problem is not the tool but the adoption from the business folks to really make decisions. Great article though
Great insights! I started building BobJ reports in the early 2000s and watched this transition happen. Great context and advice for those watching the cycle repeat itself yet again. Thank you!
If Cognos is still the best-in-class paginated reporting tool, do you expect IBM to make significant investments to surpass Tableau and gain some ground on PowerBI? If dashboards aren't going to be the ultimate end of the one-way data road, could paginated reports be that end? Qlik has nPrinting as well
Hi Jonah - I don't want to speculate what IBM will do with Cognos, but I know a lot of very good people in Ottawa trying to figure it out.
As far as paginated reports, it's very interesting to look at what Amazon is doing with Quicksight Paginated Reporting. I think this is an area that is desperate for some innovation, but I know paginated reporting is not very appealing to tech startups because it's 'legacy.'
So while I don't think they will be THE front end of the future BI platform, I think they need to be an option. And they currently aren't with the market leaders.
It was like looking back to my own history when reading this article. I can confirm all that has been discussed here actually Tony. I started with Cognos BI at a large manufacturer in the 90's and at Cognos in Belgium in 2000. Those were the booming BI years where only Cognos and Business Objects existed. There was no real competition and Microsoft was for consumers or very small businesses. In Belgium it was mainly Qlik that tookover the BI world after BO was acquired by SAP and Cognos by IBM. Then came Tableau and others. Today MS PowerBI is all over the place. I do not want to claim it is not so good, as it actually is. If you are looking for a interactive Dashboarding and Vizualisation tool then PowerBI is perfect. Legacy BI tools like BO and Cognos missed that boat and now it is to late. However, I also see a lot of customers struggling to migrate there "real" reports from Cognos to PowerBI. Yes, it apparently has also his limitations :-) Anyway, wondering if others see this as well?
Glad to know I got the history right! Yes, I see that too. It is very difficult to get off of Cognos because nothing can replace the paginated reporting function. Yet.
Great post. Having lived through many of these evolutions, I keep coming back to Steve Jobs talking about disintermediation. Its better for you to disintermediate yourself than have a competitor do it. Everyone knows this inherently but it is almost impossible to do in the moment. How can you risk killing your cash cow? How can you do it in the face of a massive installed base? Satya Nadella famously did this with Microsoft and Azure, but so many companies kicked the hard decision down the road and paid dearly for it. Oracle and IBM should have major players in the Cloud. Teradata should have been a player in Cloud Data Warehousing. I could list a hundred examples. One thing about technology--it's never a dull time, and the only constant is change.
That's an excellent point. I had a front row seat to IBMs attempts to become a cloud player. They had some good ideas and tech, but clearly it didn't work out.
Great observations. I was a PowerBuilder expert in the '00s, back when you could earn $150/hr with it. That tool eventually died, but the skills I gained at relational database design and query performance kept my career afloat.
Ugh. I had a long comment but then substack made me login and I lost it. Long story short, I think you nailed it on MS. They will never lead but will constantly be lurking. Curious to see who, if anyone, truly becomes the new leader. Or if it fragments as orgs choose different tools based on what’s best for them and their data culture.
Great observation and things change and remain the same. There was a push for BICC, COE and dreaded "self-service" Analytics. Then BOBJ (webi, Xcelcius, Lumira, IDT and so forth) and cognos came. For SAP BW then BW/HANA came, there was an intermittent flow of sas taking over analytics. In the end as far as business folks only have power to understand line and graph charts with colors these tools will keep coming and going. The problem is not the tool but the adoption from the business folks to really make decisions. Great article though
Great insights! I started building BobJ reports in the early 2000s and watched this transition happen. Great context and advice for those watching the cycle repeat itself yet again. Thank you!
You are welcome Jacob - I think us old Cognos and BOBJ pros have a very similar tale to tell. Life goes on though!
If Cognos is still the best-in-class paginated reporting tool, do you expect IBM to make significant investments to surpass Tableau and gain some ground on PowerBI? If dashboards aren't going to be the ultimate end of the one-way data road, could paginated reports be that end? Qlik has nPrinting as well
Hi Jonah - I don't want to speculate what IBM will do with Cognos, but I know a lot of very good people in Ottawa trying to figure it out.
As far as paginated reports, it's very interesting to look at what Amazon is doing with Quicksight Paginated Reporting. I think this is an area that is desperate for some innovation, but I know paginated reporting is not very appealing to tech startups because it's 'legacy.'
So while I don't think they will be THE front end of the future BI platform, I think they need to be an option. And they currently aren't with the market leaders.
It was like looking back to my own history when reading this article. I can confirm all that has been discussed here actually Tony. I started with Cognos BI at a large manufacturer in the 90's and at Cognos in Belgium in 2000. Those were the booming BI years where only Cognos and Business Objects existed. There was no real competition and Microsoft was for consumers or very small businesses. In Belgium it was mainly Qlik that tookover the BI world after BO was acquired by SAP and Cognos by IBM. Then came Tableau and others. Today MS PowerBI is all over the place. I do not want to claim it is not so good, as it actually is. If you are looking for a interactive Dashboarding and Vizualisation tool then PowerBI is perfect. Legacy BI tools like BO and Cognos missed that boat and now it is to late. However, I also see a lot of customers struggling to migrate there "real" reports from Cognos to PowerBI. Yes, it apparently has also his limitations :-) Anyway, wondering if others see this as well?
Glad to know I got the history right! Yes, I see that too. It is very difficult to get off of Cognos because nothing can replace the paginated reporting function. Yet.