As we’ve mentioned before, as of April 2018 there will be limited extended support for Cognos 10.x. Sure, that sounds like a long time from now, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my time in enterprise IT, it’s that making a change is like turning a battleship. You need to start actively planning for it and plotting your course way ahead of time to ensure everything runs smoothly. Read more
As part of the accelerated release schedule initiated with the introduction of Cognos Analytics last December, IBM made the latest release, Cognos 11.0.4 aka Cognos Analytics Release 4, available on September 16th.
While each of the previous releases have included enhancements and new functionality, Cognos Analytics Release 4 is significant enough that we wanted to present an article to our community focusing on what we feel the most compelling new features are based the time we’ve spent exploring the updated platform. Read more
Ironside recently reported a new issue to IBM that is now confirmed as having an impact on all TM1 sites regardless of version. The Ironside Managed Services team uncovered the issue while troubleshooting a client’s environment.
“In our efforts to secure an environment for one of our larger insurance clients, it was noticed that the SSL certificate was going to expire shortly,” said Erik Romanek, Ironside’s Director of Platform and Managed Services. “John Commons, one of Ironside’s platform consultants, worked with IBM to come up with a few solution options. This is just another example of Ironside going the extra mile to make sure the implementations we work on are configured securely and for longevity.” Read more
Tableau 10 was released on August 15th, and it is quite an upgrade. I’ve been spending some time doing hands-on testing of the new version, and I’m excited to share some of the new features I’ve explored with you.
In addition to a new custom font, new color palettes, and new themes that make Tableau more beautiful and visually appealing than ever, Tableau 10 has made great strides in bringing some of the most widely requested features from past releases into reality for this one. I’m going to walk you through some of the ones we at Ironside find most compelling and explain what the practical impact of each one is on the overall functionality of Tableau. This article will cover the following new features: Read more
If modern business data is a river, then traditional enterprise business intelligence is a bucket. Sure, you can pull some valuable and reliable insights at regular intervals that will help you take the pulse of what’s going on day to day, but there’s a much larger percentage of valuable insight that’s just going to wash by. That’s why having a complementary data discovery strategy is so important: it helps you be where you need to be in that flood to catch what’s most relevant to your current business concerns. One of the ways Ironside is helping our clients get to this level of self-service flexibility is by becoming a Tableau partner. Read more
Tableau’s powerful data discovery and visual analytics capabilities make it an ideal tool for enabling end users to achieve data driven insights at the speed of business. It puts data in the hands of the business users who have the most to gain from it in an intuitive manner that allows for rapid visualization and actionable insight through self-service analytics. Read more
Cubes (including Cognos PowerCubes and Dynamic Cubes, as well as other file-based cube technologies) are well-known, commonly used, and valuable data sources in reporting. As specially indexed binary files, report performance with cubes is generally robust, however when cube files grow very large (or there is high simultaneous demand reading from the cube), response time can and will decrease. That’s why it can sometimes be useful to show cube sizes on BI reports to let authors know when a cube’s size could be affecting performance. Read more
The immense amount of data being collected today, in any industry, expands the reality of advanced analytics and data science. In concept, it creates an explosion of opportunities and expands what can be accomplished. In reality, we are often limited in scope by our data processing systems which may not be able to handle the complexity and quantity of data available to us. The introduction of Spark has offered a solution to this issue with a cluster computing platform that outperforms Hadoop. Its Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) allows for parallel processing on a distributed collection of objects enhancing the speed of data processing. For this reason, Spark has received a lot of interest and promotion in the world of big data and advanced analytics, and for good reason. Read more
Metadata packages usually connect or point to particular data sources, but what if for testing, business, or application reasons you need a package to dynamically reference a different data source based on the executing user, user job function, or user location? Read more
We heard a lot of great questions during the Cognos Analytics Webinar Q&A we held after our live presentation. The discussion was so productive we thought we’d roll out a transcript as an article so all of you can easily get the Cognos Analytics answers you’re searching for. Read more
Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.