Cognos: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

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Pedro Ining
Senior Cognos and BI Architect
Senturus, Inc. 

Pedro brings over 20 years of analytics and data warehousing experience to his role. Pedro has been instrumental in architecting and implementing large-scale analytics systems, data models and data warehousing systems for clients in a variety of industries. Keeping pace with the constantly evolving BI industry, Pedro’s rich skillset includes Cognos, MicroStrategy, Informatica, Tableau and Microsoft Azure. 

Devon Reddick
Azure and Power BI Architect
Senturus, Inc.

Devon Reddick is a talented Azure and Power BI data architect. For a decade, he has been helping organizations build, migrate, modernize and manage their applications, infrastructure, data and analytics in the cloud. Devon joins Senturus from 3Cloud, a top Microsoft services partner, where he was also involved in customer insight and data governance programs. His toolset expertise includes Power BI, Azure, Data Lake, Azure Analysis Services, SSAS, DAX, SQL and Dynamics 365.

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0:12
Hello everyone, and welcome today’s Senturus webinar on Cognos.

0:16
Should I stay or should I go?

0:20
Thanks for joining us today.

0:21
It’s always great to have you here.

0:23
Quick overview of today’s agenda that we’re going to start off with a few introductions.

0:27
Got a couple of presenters today.

0:29
We’re going to talk a little bit about industry trends that we’re seeing upfront and then we’ll talk about some of the options for what to do about Cognos.

0:39
See some companies deciding to just stay on Cognos, others are choosing to extend Cognos on the other platforms.

0:45
So keeping Cognos partially, but leveraging your platforms like BI and Tableau.

0:52
And another option is leaving Cognos altogether.

0:54
We do see companies that are choosing to move on completely and are looking for the best way to migrate off of their current Cognos environments.

1:04
We’ll wrap up with a little overview of Senturus, some additional resources that you can find on our website.

1:10
And as I said, we’ll do Q and A session at the end here today.

1:16
So before we get started, a few quick introductions today, I’m joined by Pedro Inning.

1:20
Pedro’s one of our senior BI architects here, 20 plus years of the Cognos world and now a bunch of years of the Power BI world also.

1:28
So welcome, Pedro.

1:30
Thank you for joining us.

1:32
We’re also joined by Devin Reddick, who is one of our Power BI architects.

1:37
And Devin is actually going to be doing the bulk of today’s presentation.

1:41
So very excited to have you here today, Devin.

1:44
As for me, I’m Steve Reed Pitman, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Engineering here at Senturus.

1:51
As usual, I’m going to just hand you the beginning and ending of the webinar that Devin and Pedro are going to cover most of the details.

2:00
And before I turn it over to Devin, we want to do a quick poll just to kind of get a sense of where everybody is.

2:06
So today’s poll is which platform, which BI platform is your organization currently using?

2:12
And this really platform or platforms.

2:14
Can we know that many of you are actually, you know, already running in hybrid environments.

2:20
So go ahead and drop your answers in there.

2:26
Of course, almost all of you are answering Cognos as well.

2:29
That certainly makes sense.

2:31
I probably could have guessed that one.

2:33
I actually have placed that on that looks like about half of you are Power BI, about half below right now and about 12% coming in as other.

2:43
I’m going to go ahead and shut down the pole.

2:46
Looks like most everybody has answered and I’m going to share those results so everybody can see where we are.

2:52
So again, almost all of you are on Cognos.

2:54
No surprise, a little more than half are using Power BI already.

3:00
Little under half are using Tableau.

3:02
About a 10th of you using other platforms.

3:04
I see Incorta in here, I’ve got Google Looker just looking at some of the answers people are providing for other platforms that they’re using All right with that, I’m going to stop sharing those poll results and I am going to turn the mic over to Mr. Devin Riddick.

3:24
Oh, howdy.

3:25
Actually, I’m really excited about that poll.

3:27
Seeing both Power BI and Tableau up there.

3:29
That’s actually one of the internal conversations we always have because they’re both fantastic at what they do and they both are great at doing different things.

3:38
So I’m happy to see that there’s a pretty healthy split between the two because I think the conversation we’re having today isn’t really, even though I’m traditionally, my background is Azure, it’s Power BI, Tableau though still we have a ton of Tableau experience within our organization.

3:53
So we’re interesting because we split between Cognos, Power BI and Tableau.

3:58
So it’s nice to see that we’re not leaving anybody out on this one.

4:01
And it’s also nice to know that we kind of have that coverage across those 3 backgrounds.

4:06
So the reason why I’m leading this conversation, as you can imagine, when we looked have that conversation around stay or go as a Power BI and as an Azure Architect, I’m often involved in those early conversations around the going part.

4:22
So it leads a lot of, there’s a lot of opportunity in this conversation to learn about what other teams are doing.

4:29
We’re fortunate to work with a pretty broad range of teams across quite a few industries.

4:34
And what we’ve done today, really the kind of purpose has been taking a lot of the input from those groups and talking about some of the wider trends that we’ve seen within the environment.

4:46
So it’s really, it’s got a Cognos back end here, but the intent is not just to look at leaving right where we’ve got folks that would stay and they absolutely have a great purpose to stay.

4:57
So we’re not just focusing on going.

5:00
We’re definitely taking a kind of a broader stroke at this one because there’s quite a, a good reason to stay within the organization.

5:08
Couple big pieces.

5:10
And then once again, a lot of this comes from stuff we’re hearing.

5:13
Actually all this comes from stuff we’re hearing from our partners.

5:17
One of the things they always ask us is what does the industry look like?

5:20
And that’s like, you know, they want to know where do I start and what’s everybody else doing.

5:24
This the opportunity for us to tell you what everybody else is doing.

5:29
Some of the biggest changes probably over, I don’t know, the past few years.

5:35
Data modernization’s really not being LED as much by IT leadership as it used to be.

5:41
It used to be, you know, 90% where you’d have, you know, your CIO, your CTO, directors of technology.

5:46
Those people are lobbying for their budgets, they’re lobbying for their new platforms, their hardware, their infrastructure.

5:52
That hasn’t changed.

5:53
That’s still happening.

5:54
What has changed is that people aren’t just getting served the reports as much now.

6:01
And we’re starting to see really, really tech savvy C-Suite.

6:06
And not only are they tech savvy, but they’re also cost savvy.

6:10
So they’re saying things like how much they, this what I want, cloud transformation, AI, data science.

6:17
But then they’re turning around and saying to you guys, how, how much money is this going to cost and how long is this going to take?

6:22
So we’re seeing a ton of CFOs directors of finance that are really looking for more granular reporting.

6:29
They’re looking for the ability to slice data, investigate trends.

6:32
They’re looking to do it for themselves.

6:33
They want their team to be able to generate reports for them or they want to be able to do their own.

6:38
Even at that high level, we’re seeing a lot of folks are way more hands on.

6:42
So and rather than shipping off a question to an analyst, a lot of those folks are really wanting to do it themselves.

6:50
Another one, which is also, it’s kind of a funny trend is that grassroots we’re talking about people from the business lines.

6:58
People are starting to create smaller pockets of analytics and reporting within the ecosystem.

7:04
So we’ve got teams that have these really robust and large Cognos ecosystems and then their internal teams aren’t leveraging those at all.

7:11
They’re building out smaller platforms other places.

7:14
And it’s because there’s quite a bit of kind of the ability to pick up some of these smaller packages, smaller licensing, smaller platforms and start building these out on their own.

7:25
And that can leave our teams a little bit on their back foot trying to catch up with those skill sets.

7:31
But outside of just the cultural shift, there definitely still is going to be kind of the modern data estate shift as well, where it’s an entire technological platform shift.

7:44
So outside of individuals leading the charge, we’re still in the middle of quite a few large organizations looking at their overall platform being modernized.

7:55
And so we’re seeing some pretty large cloud initiatives and that’s pushing our reporting teams to have to look outside of their current platform because their sources are changing their, you know, the ETL is changing.

8:06
And so as those sources are changing, we’ve got 15 potentially 20 years worth of content, but we’re getting all new sources and we can’t always expect those sources are going to be a one to one perfect match.

8:18
So while we’re in the process of modernizing, this usually a good opportunity to kind of evaluate what do we have, you know, and then surprisingly, one of the biggest reasons we’ve heard recently of people moving off of Cognos is just flat out were told to.

8:32
So that’s kind of a new one recently is that our leadership teams are signing enterprise agreements with other platforms and licensing for those platforms sometimes just gets bundled in.

8:44
So there’s a couple things.

8:46
And outside of that, outside of just the whole technological shift, there’s also kind of industry hot topic items they’re popping up and there’s other platforms that are out there that are more native to those new ideas.

8:58
And so when they’re going out and they’re looking for new use cases, I know everybody’s heard these things, but I’m going to say them again, because these are the things we’re hearing when we’re sitting down and talk with folks is that folks are really interested in pushing, you know, pushing into generative AI.

9:11
They’re interested in Copilot and Fabric.

9:13
They want data science workloads and they want to be able to kind of stay ahead of where these trends are, are heading.

9:21
They want things like deployment pipelines and change control.

9:27
It’s things that Cognos has added over time, but other platforms have kind of a harder marketing campaign around those pieces.

9:37
We’ve also got folks that are just looking to consolidate down.

9:44
They’ve got a ton of sprawl that’s been happening, got data savvy leadership, and they’re looking for more visibility around the ROI that these tools have.

9:55
Why do we have this many things?

9:57
That’s a question that we hear all the time.

9:59
It takes us X amount of tools to do this one thing.

10:04
So there’s a really big effort right now for consolidating this ecosystems down.

10:08
They want unified billing.

10:10
They want licensing to be, you know, more easily understood.

10:14
And one of the ones that I think has really been driving a huge lead in this the ability to do chargebacks.

10:20
They people as organizations, they want to take their data and monetize it, but they also want to make sure that all of that infrastructure, all the data that’s been curated, there’s a way to track that back to the people who are utilizing those things and get that back, get that money back.

10:35
So it’s not just IT footing the bill for things.

10:37
Now our CFOs are saying, OK, how does the rest of our footprint impact the things you’re doing?

10:44
So I think I’ve heard charge back more in the past year than I’ve heard in almost all the years combined.

10:50
Folks are also looking just in general for kind of a one stop shop experience.

10:54
I’ve heard quite a few times that we have to do our data transformation here we’re doing our reporting here we’re doing if they’re getting their ingestion with one tool, they’re having to then do distribution with another.

11:05
Cognos fortunately is really phenomenal at the most of those things.

11:10
But for data, things like data transformation and ETL, you know you’re going somewhere else to get that.

11:15
So there’s an effort to kind of consolidate things down in the into one platform.

11:20
So as we look at kind of cutting down our overhead, those platforms that allow you to do that are looking more, you know, they’re looking better.

11:28
So when we talk about consolidating tools, we’re seeing more folks when they’re doing the pure one ecosystem consolidation, we’re seeing more on the Power BI path.

11:36
And that’s mostly because of the Azure, you know, cloud integration.

11:40
Now with Fabric, it’s become even more of a thing, as you can imagine.

11:44
Now it’s all in one web page.

11:45
You don’t even have to go to, you know, your Azure portal at this point.

11:49
Tableau on the other hand, people are definitely still leveraging it for, you know, just kind of it’s world class reporting capabilities.

11:56
So tool consolidation.

11:59
How does we’ve got folks that want to shrink what they’ve got?

12:04
The opposite of that too.

12:05
We’ve got folks that are trying to take what they’ve got.

12:08
They’re trying to get the best out of it.

12:10
They’re trying to figure out what they have and they want to make it work as well as possible and they don’t want to lock themselves down necessarily to one ecosystem.

12:21
This happening in more ways than one.

12:25
We’ve got, I think mergers and acquisitions is a big one.

12:28
Lately teams have gone into acquisition mode.

12:31
We’ve seen recently we’ve worked with a handful of groups and their number one focus is expediting the time it takes to acquire another facility.

12:41
That’s been one of the biggest things for them.

12:43
It takes them an incredible amount of time.

12:45
They’ve got tools that have to be consolidated, rolled in and then it’s not just replace the tools that those mergers are using.

12:53
Sometimes the mergers they’re picking up are have better platforms than they do.

12:57
So that’s a big kicker on this one.

12:59
We already talked about that grassroots innovation.

13:01
I think that’s one of the pieces that at often times drives a lot of the organizations to start looking at these tools sooner is at, you know, even after a merger, this could happen.

13:11
But some teams will pick something up and it will gain traction.

13:14
And now that it’s getting traction, you can’t just, you know, get them back on the rails and get them back into one platform.

13:20
It’s kind of already out there.

13:22
And so for those teams that are maintaining those multiple tool sets, there’s a bit of an organic sprawl that’s happening.

13:30
And so trying to maintain all those things into one roof really just isn’t possible.

13:35
Another part of this though, there’s kind of two parts.

13:37
One is that there’s things that have kind of grown out.

13:40
The other one is that there’s things that they want you want to continue to grow out.

13:44
There’s things you want to continue to expand upon.

13:46
And those are kind of bucketed into exploring new ideas.

13:50
And there’s really kind of a large discovery period that I think is definitely happening right now.

13:56
And it’s because of a lot of this new technology that’s been kind of rapidly rolling out.

14:01
And it’s getting people to kind of stick their head out of their small bubble and figure out what else is out there.

14:05
But there’s some severe hesitation because we’ve built out platforms that we’ve been using for what is old enough to essentially give them like a driver’s license and let them potentially go off like our Cognos platform.

14:19
Some of them are old, you know, old enough to drink at this point role, you know, old enough to go vote.

14:23
That’s how old some of our ecosystems are.

14:27
That’s a lot.

14:28
There’s a ton to unpack there.

14:30
So we need things like time to transition.

14:33
We can’t do it all at once.

14:35
We need time to transition.

14:36
We need time to explore new things.

14:38
So we’ll talk real quick about the staying on Cognos piece because for a ton of teams, there’s just not a reason.

14:44
Leaving is not an option.

14:45
It’s just not.

14:46
It’s not in there, it’s not in their book.

14:50
So why are we staying?

14:51
These are the reasons.

14:52
Right now we’re seeing a ton of teams, thousands of bursts list reports.

14:58
They’re hitting internal clients or hitting external clients.

15:01
The cost to rebuild those versus the risk of rebuilding those somewhere else is not it.

15:08
The juice is not worth the squeeze.

15:09
That’s the phrase I’ll throw out on that one.

15:11
It’s just not worth opening yourselves up to the risk of doing that.

15:16
I mean, Cognos is fantastic at what it does.

15:18
I mean, it’s just works.

15:19
The tools, the tools that they have out there right now running those reports, getting those things distributed, phenomenal.

15:25
It’s the best what it does.

15:27
So for the regulatory reasons, the financial reasons, people are staying and that’s OK.

15:33
If you’ve been running an ecosystem for 1516 years, it could it probably going to be around for 15 or 16 more years.

15:41
There’s some things that we’re hearing though that are concerns on the staying front.

15:46
We know that we if we’re to stay, we’re deciding to stay.

15:50
So let’s keep our eyes on some things.

15:51
One of them is that we know 11.2.4 is kind of on borrowed time right now.

15:58
I wouldn’t be shocked if end of life, you know, end of support is announced mid, you know, sometime next year.

16:04
And so with that with 11.2.4 within a support on their query studio, analysis studio that those are going to be going with them.

16:12
So there’s workarounds.

16:14
I mean, there’s don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely workarounds to get those things squared away with kind of newer platforms with the Cognos, but the team teams are questioning is the lift to get those things.

16:25
They’re going to give us the opportunity.

16:28
Should we take this opportunity to look elsewhere?

16:30
If there’s any rework that ever has to be done, it’s usually a good opportunity to at least see what else is going on.

16:37
Also, I won’t dig into this.

16:38
I’ll let it kind of speak for itself with the cost of support feels like it’s going up in general.

16:44
I’ll leave it at that.

16:45
And we still want to make sure that our infrastructure still skill set stays up.

16:50
You know, we want to make sure that we keep those sharp because if we’re still maintaining our on Prem ecosystem, we need to make sure that we’ve got the ability to continue to do that.

17:00
Wait, I know there’s definitely Cognos cloud options, but if you’re considering those, you’re kind of considering an internal migration to begin with.

17:07
So there’s just some things that we see across the board and these are the kind of bullet points folks are kind of ruminating them.

17:16
There’s other also a desire to extend cross-platform.

17:21
So right now Cognos is designed to serve Cognos.

17:25
So when we talked about the idea of going cross-platform, we’re talking about the idea of taking the things we’ve got all the data sets we have and trying to extend those out to other platforms that really Cognos was not intended to get to.

17:38
So we’re talking about companies that have multiple platforms and they come in two flavours.

17:43
We have folks that are doing it temporarily and we have folks that expect that they’re going to do that forever.

17:48
That’s just the capacity they’re going to be in.

17:51
So the kind of interest points have been bridging the gaps from Cognos to whichever tools we have.

18:02
So they’re going to new tools because they’re end users are asking for more modern data front end reporting.

18:08
They want to build out in a more interactive visualizations.

18:12
They don’t want to lose what they’ve got.

18:14
They don’t want to lose those curated data sets they’ve been building over the past 10-15 years.

18:19
And we know for a fact flow migrations don’t happen overnight.

18:23
When you sit down, when that top-level leadership initiative comes in where they say, look, we’re going to X,Y and Z yeah.

18:30
When it doesn’t happen overnight.

18:33
It’s something that you have to work towards.

18:35
So full migrations don’t happen.

18:37
So there’s definitely a stop gap too.

18:38
So transitionally, we want to see if we can figure out how can we utilize what’s in Cognos today, the back end and the data we’ve got there.

18:44
How can we use that in the future?

18:47
And then the second one is there’s teams that are just basically cutting down what they’ve got today to just those operational reports because once again, Cognos just works.

18:54
It’s really good at what it does.

18:55
Those pixel perfect reports aren’t going to change.

18:57
The bursting is not going to change.

19:00
So we talked about bridging the gap.

19:02
One of the things I want to make sure to harp on this one we’ve got in Cognos, we’ve got bulletproof curated data sets.

19:11
If we can take those with us somewhere, that would certainly be great.

19:15
We want to make more informed decisions.

19:17
And so when we’re trying to buy more time, when we’re moving somewhere, we want to make sure we’ve got all the information we could possibly have.

19:23
We want to get out there, kick some more tires, do some more product bake offs.

19:29
It’s a big thing.

19:29
If you could take your data with you, we give you more opportunity to make better choices.

19:34
Another piece is if you could serve that data out to the cloud.

19:37
You’ve got a cloud initiative.

19:38
You’re moving into smaller, smaller models in something like Tableau or Power BI.

19:42
That’s going to take an extract.

19:44
Certainly would be great if we could leverage the platforms that we already know that we trust, and that’s going to help reduce the amount of friction we’re getting from our end users.

19:53
We’re already changing a reporting platform.

19:56
People don’t love change.

19:57
Sometimes it can be a struggle.

19:59
So if we had people talk about wanting to take the data they got with them.

20:04
And as I mentioned a moment ago, we have years wrapped into our FM models.

20:08
It would certainly be fantastic if we didn’t have to unwind all of that immediately.

20:12
So how do we bridge that gap?

20:14
And one of the ways we’ve been doing that for teams that we’re supporting, it’s a platform that we’ve had out, I think, for over 8 years now.

20:21
It’s called the Senturus Analytics Connector.

20:23
It uses the content as is.

20:25
It gets the data into your new environment.

20:27
It gives you the opportunity to connect to Tableau, Tableau connect to Cognos as a data source.

20:33
So we have organizations both in Tableau and Power BI.

20:36
They’re currently using that to help bridge that gap.

20:38
Some of them transitional and then often a lot of them are kind of in this, you know, permanent state of having more than one tool set.

20:46
So we got to use cases and case studies that are out on our website.

20:50
And if you’re interested, I’m sure some folks on our team, she’s like, hey, you might be able to stag some time on her calendar, learn a little bit more about that connector.

21:00
And then the last part is reducing the footprint.

21:02
I think we kind of beat this one up already, but people are shrinking their platform right now.

21:07
They’re shrinking if they are leaving or if they’re going in this kind of hybrid in between state, this kind of cross-platform ecosystem, they’re usually shrinking down their footprint.

21:15
They’re trying to reduce costs.

21:17
They have licensing fees that are happening in two different places.

21:19
They have utilization happening in two different places.

21:22
So they’re trying to mitigate that cost on one side.

21:25
And then what it’s doing is it’s allowing all of our talent internally to shift to our new platform.

21:33
They’ve got to learn a new platform.

21:34
They have to learn a new skill.

21:36
So we’re keeping the things on that are absolutely necessity.

21:40
We 100% need them.

21:42
We’re not getting rid of them, but we’re cutting it down to what’s absolutely needed and then we’re moving things forward.

21:51
We’ve also got our teams that want to go all together.

21:53
And I think we’ve joked about this internally because there’s always, there’s no matter how you look at it, even if you migrate, even if you’re moving everything today, you’re still going to have a period of time where you’re in between.

22:05
There’s no, you’re going to be in kind of this dual mode for a period.

22:09
So even if you go all together, you’re going to be heading out.

22:15
The reasons why folks have been leaving.

22:17
Once again, potential cost savings.

22:19
I think this has been one of the things that has popped up pretty recently really heavily when we’re talking about cost savings on this one, we’re not just talking about the cost saving of Cognos, we’re talking about going down to smaller tool sets.

22:34
It’s part of that effort to reduce the overhead licensing across multiple platforms.

22:39
And often times once again, we’ve got other organizations and other, you know, kind of competitors to Cognos, they’re doing things like trying to wrap in licensing fees into larger enterprise agreements.

22:51
Another big piece of this that we’ve got really tech savvy businesses lately.

22:56
I mean, this it.

22:57
This has been a huge push over the past few years getting in further into self-service capabilities rather than report building capabilities.

23:06
I mean, I think you’re going to continue to see this as you’ve got folks that can start to leverage things like generative AI.

23:13
You’ve got folks that can write really complex DAX in Power BI that they could never have written before.

23:19
And it’s because they’re using something like Copilot and Microsoft have their partnership through open through Open AI.

23:26
So I mean, that’s you’re seeing the barrier of entry to reporting really getting, you know, smaller and smaller.

23:34
And one of the jokes that was made on a call recently is that one of the controllers that we’re supporting one of the transitions into the new platform they’re in the controller straight up said, I don’t want reports anymore.

23:43
I just want data.

23:44
She’s like, just give me the data and we’ll, you know, we’ll do the reporting.

23:47
So the curated data that’s in Cognos right now, it’s gold.

23:51
So moving, figuring out what are we moving?

23:54
You know, when we make our migrations, how do we how do we take what we need?

23:58
You know, as we’re making moves, especially as we talk about consolidating down ETL, whatever you want to whatever you want to call it on your team, We’ve got folks that are looking for platforms that are going to cover kind of all their needs.

24:13
They’re looking for their data transformation, their lake house development functionality, data science workloads, Gen.

24:18
AII, mean the list goes on all the way through automation, deployment use cases.

24:23
But I know through all this, I’ve, I’m the Power BI and Azure architect.

24:28
But I do want to let Pedro speak for a second because I think he’s really good to level set some expectations as a Cognos architect himself.

24:37
Thank you, Devin.

24:40
Yeah.

24:40
For those of you who are considering leaving Cognos, we all have to be aware of that over the years, a lot of different Cognos BI technologies were developed, right?

24:50
I mean, I’ve worked with Cognos over 20 years now through all the various centerizations.

24:54
So I’ve seen the evolution of the Cognos products reporting at Cognos 8.

24:58
Now we’re at Cognos Analytics 12 right now.

25:01
This slide shows we’ve got a lot of different reporting tools, dashboard tools, modeling tools, things like that, right?

25:11
So we have things like framework management, Transformer and also Studio, Courier Studio, Power Play Studio.

25:20
These tools are still embedded in the product, right?

25:23
And then 2015 Cognos released data modules, I think it was the 11 point product.

25:29
So they were trying to do more of a self-service modeling and data engineering aspect of the product itself, right?

25:36
You know, but the key take away is that because Cognos has this long legacy of various modeling reporting tools throughout its generations, right, there’s not a true magic bullet.

25:48
You know, people always like to look for a magic bullet.

25:51
Is there a software that I could use to just push and it goes from left to the right?

25:55
I’m done.

25:56
There’s no one to one conversion that’ll take all these various components within a Cognos ecosystem and convert it to another two like Power BI or Tableau, if any firm out there is telling you that.

26:09
But this going to be easy, you know, it’s not going to take any time.

26:12
I would say that’s kind of a big red flag right there from that perspective, you know, why is there no magic bullet?

26:19
Well, again, we talked about a lot of those old and new components of Cognos itself, but many of them, many of these legacy implementations.

26:29
We have hundreds of forts as Devin message, right?

26:33
These reports are based on dozens of different packages, dozens of different FM models, probably the newer ones that may be based on dozens of data modules itself.

26:43
These bursts of reports could be running could be running on a legacy implementation of Cognos that just runs.

26:48
It runs automatically.

26:49
It’s been running for many, many years.

26:51
It gets bursted out to 500 participants in e-mail.

26:55
Now all they know is they get this report.

26:56
They don’t care where it came from.

26:57
This comes, I want to keep that functionality, right.

27:00
So, and also the development of these reports packages and FM models have been done over the years, but potentially by different generations of Cognos developers.

27:12
So for example, you’ve created framework model version one 1520 years ago, those set of developers have left and you, you set a developers have come in and they just simply take a copy of that FM model, right?

27:23
And rename it something else and make changes to that.

27:26
And new reports are based off of that FM models produced 20 different new packages and so on.

27:32
We had this effect of all these different generations.

27:34
How many folks have seen that where I’ve got to manage five different effort models and 20 packages and they all produce maybe 300 different kinds of reports.

27:44
So the point is that there’s not a magic bullet to take all those things and move it over to a new two like Power BI.

27:50
But here at Senturus, I want to mention that, you know, I’ve got my experience in in Cognos over 20 years and also now in the Microsoft platform.

27:59
We have people like dev on our team who are specializing in the platform of Microsoft and Power BI.

28:05
But we want to share with you some of our methodologies here of tackling this cognitive to Power BI migration.

28:12
We also have some in house developed migration tools that we can use to help migrate from Cognos to Power BI.

28:19
So today, what we’re going to do for the rest of the webinar is really just talk about going to a deeper dive into some of those considerations and methodologies for migrating from Cognos to Power BI.

28:30
We’re going to look at particular use cases.

28:32
We have the models and things like that.

28:34
So I’m going to take it back to Devon now, and he’s going to take you how you might tackle such a migration from Cognos to Power BI.

28:42
Appreciate it.

28:43
I’ve also been slowly, slowly converting Pedro to a Power BI developer.

28:48
He won’t do it, but slowly it’s been, it’s been something I’ve been working on.

28:53
We’ve got a handful of projects recently together too.

28:55
So I know the both of us are, we’re both not only, you know, engaged in, so the newer client conversations, but we also both hands on, you know, consultants as well.

29:03
So we’re both project based.

29:05
We’re working with teams and building things out.

29:07
So we’re, it’s interesting.

29:09
So you kind of have visibility on both sides at the beginning of conversations, but all the way then through, you know, implementation and rolling out, which is I think a bit of a unique exposure because oftentimes there’s folks that focus on one side or the other.

29:23
And you know, we’re a relatively, you know, smaller team.

29:26
So we get to play on both sides of the ball, which has been pretty awesome.

29:30
So we’ve got 22 major questions.

29:35
It’s every conversation, every single time we start a new conversation.

29:40
Anytime anybody asks us about a migration, a move reduction footprint, where do we start?

29:48
Holy moly, I wish I had an answer that was a silver bullet for every single team.

29:54
Every organization is different.

29:57
The needs are different your internal clients are different.

30:01
There’s going to be things about your model, FM model, your packages that are great.

30:07
There’s things that might be terrifying.

30:10
There’s an organic sprawl.

30:12
But every single one, I’m not kidding.

30:14
It’s like we’re playing bingo, you know, we’re playing like, you know, a client called Bingo.

30:20
The first one, where do we start?

30:23
There’s a bit of analysis paralysis around this.

30:25
It’s pretty daunting.

30:27
And it’s really because of that organic sprawl that’s happening.

30:29
And I think if we stop and we look at a migration, you say I am migrating.

30:35
What are we migrating?

30:37
I think that’s the hardest question for a lot of folks to really grasp is that we’re not looking for a one to one.

30:44
You know, Cognos is phenomenal at what it does.

30:46
It’s phenomenal at a in what it’s been doing for years.

30:51
That doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to move one to one to a new ecosystem.

30:55
There’s new architecture that could potentially be understood and evaluated.

31:00
Different platforms have different strengths.

31:03
I mean, there’s it’s one thing to have a giant monolithic model that’s, you know, running direct query back to the source.

31:09
There’s another thing to put it inside of a platform that’s compressing it.

31:12
And it needs you to be a little bit more aware of the economy of scale that your data is running into.

31:18
So where do we start?

31:21
That’s the big one.

31:22
This when we’re talking about kind of going through the method that we would tackle.

31:26
And this, I think the reason why this helpful to talk about this here is because internally this would also apply if you were going to tackle something yourself.

31:32
So most teams look at their model or their package and they start there, they try to trickle their requirements.

31:40
So they start kind of looking at what we called package down.

31:44
So in their minds, there’s this universal valuable data.

31:47
It’s going to be driving the reporting content that’s going to be what they want to move, which means that data then points to almost all of their reporting, right?

31:56
So how are you cutting that down into bite sized chunks?

31:59
That can be challenging.

32:01
We usually want to start with the reports up, not just the reports themselves, because we’re, like I said, we’re not always moving one to one.

32:08
I mean, I think part of the idea of a migration is taking a look at the strengths of the platform you’re moving to.

32:13
So if we’re going to Tableau, if we’re going to Power BI we’re going to Fabric with Power BI, what do we need to do to make sure architecturally we’re making the right choices here?

32:26
So before all that, though, our customer side, right, client facing, customer facing piece of this, you guys have your internal customers, we’re moving something that impacts their reports.

32:37
It impacts things that they have potentially been using for an incredibly long time.

32:43
So we often lean towards the critical reporting piece because that is going to help us focus on the customer.

32:49
It’s going to give us critical customers.

32:52
It’s going to give them an extra bit of care.

32:55
There are new pilot group.

32:56
You know there are good.

32:58
They’re going to be our champions.

32:59
They’re the ones that are going to be our initial Guinea pigs, right?

33:02
We need to pick small teams, great use cases, things that are actually going to make an impact within the organization.

33:10
Looking for opportunity for a facelift for some of those reports, man, I’ll tell you, we often end up working with the Office of Finance first because they’re the ones paying the bills.

33:19
So when we sit down to figure out who needs some extra love, that’s a good opportunity.

33:24
Figuring out who those people are and what their use cases are.

33:27
That by itself is a huge factor.

33:30
Selfishly, they’re our pilot group.

33:34
They’re also going to be our your subject matter experts in the long run, self-sufficient users, people who help develop new reports, people who help develop some of these, some, you know, self-service models.

33:45
Going forward, they’re going to be more articulate with what’s being built because they help validate and test it.

33:51
So selfishly, we’re going to reduce the burden on ourselves on that one long run.

33:56
But we really want to focus on seeing if we can work with folks through, you know, receptive to change.

34:01
There’s some we talked about some of the reports we’ve got there out there, highly operational, highly functional.

34:06
It’s just an inconvenience if we’re moving them for somebody.

34:08
So are we looking for those as our initial low hanging fruit when we’re trying out a new platform?

34:13
Probably not.

34:15
We’re expecting just a bit of a learning curve.

34:16
So we want to try to find the right people conducive to change, folks that are interested and excited for the new platform.

34:23
There’s a lot of grumbling when you leave any platform, you’ll hear people that’ll say why are we doing this?

34:27
I mean, jeez, I spent time doing operational management back at Walgreens and people would freak out at me anytime we moved where the Sudafed was two boxes down.

34:35
And they’re freaking out.

34:36
Like, you know, someone just told them the world’s going to end.

34:39
Now imagine we’re moving our entire reporting ecosystem.

34:43
The last two pieces are more on the architectural side.

34:45
So what are we moving and is it technically relevant?

34:50
Does this fit the architecture of where we’re going?

34:52
And I think between Pedro and I sitting down and talking, I think this probably one of the biggest gaps we’ve got folks that have been living in an ecosystem for forever.

35:02
They’re just not thinking, is this built for our new environment, right?

35:07
They’re trying to take the same file of stuff and move it into a new box.

35:11
And I think that’s where interesting enough, having kind of the blend of skill sets we have here, we end up seeing a lot of people that have already taken this journey and, you know, tackled it on their own.

35:21
And they’ve really just kind of moved all of their things from one point to another.

35:26
And they’re not getting the most out of the platform they’re moving to because they didn’t stop to say, does this architecturally make sense?

35:34
And is this relevant?

35:35
So I’ll move through this.

35:37
And This back half gets a little bit more technically crunchy.

35:40
So bear with us, but this goes through kind of the journey.

35:44
This the journey that anybody would go through if they’re going to start figuring out what needs to move, if they’re going to take their Cognos environment, start moving into a new platform.

35:51
So bear with us.

35:53
We’ll try to keep it pretty high level, but ultimately, we’ve got a ton of places we need to stop to get our full shopping list of things removing.

36:01
So if we’re looking at model or models, if we’re looking at rebuilding those, we have to figure out what’s dependent against those models, considering Power BI handles user access at a workspace level, things like that.

36:18
You know, we’re talking about different options for access management, distribution, row level security.

36:26
So we’re taking a look at that.

36:27
We need to take a look at the opportunity as we’re moving into our new platform.

36:31
We want to try to make sure that we’re doing this in in a way that makes sense and we’re bringing what is absolutely required for what we want to rebuild with the context of where it is going.

36:42
So we’ve got a lot of places we have to step.

36:43
So to rebuild these reports, given whatever scope we’ve got, we decided just to narrow down the conversation that we are actually going to walk through this in the scope as if we’re going to rebuild.

36:54
There’s a sample report that’s out there and Cognos, a lot of you might be familiar with it, I’ll show it in a second here, but it’s referred to as the sales manager report.

37:02
Some of you guys might have it installed right now, but that’s kind of the scope that we’re going to talk about through this process here.

37:08
So there’s going to be a bunch of screenshots and they’re all referencing the sales manager report itself.

37:12
So we’ve got a lot of places we need to go look at.

37:14
Our FM model is going to be our raw tables.

37:16
It’s going to be our relationships coming out of the database view.

37:20
Our business view is going to handle all of our semantic transformation, all of our naming conventions.

37:25
And then we’ve actually got to go to web.

37:26
We got to go to Cognos Analytics to go figure out not only the queries that have been added by the end users, but also how those have been extended further.

37:35
And we’re going with the mindset that we need to take all those things I just said.

37:39
And now we’ve got to get them to a different platform.

37:42
You’ve got to get them into a different architectural environment.

37:45
We’ve got to figure out how are we going to handle these.

37:47
And so in, in my mind, there are more ways to answer this question of how are we going to do this?

37:55
And I’ve, there’s a ton of questions people have said is how would we do it as an organization?

37:59
Everybody’s team is very different.

38:02
There’s no, once again, no silver bullet on the migration, especially to something like fabric.

38:06
So each team’s going to have different challenges.

38:09
We’d want to talk to individually about what those are before trying to make any sort of recommendations.

38:13
But this was the mentality going forward.

38:15
I need things.

38:16
This where we’re headed by hand.

38:22
We’re doing this by hand.

38:23
This our journey and we’re going to do a rapid fire on this one.

38:27
We’ve got better reports.

38:28
We’re starting with, right.

38:29
This where we’re starting sales manager report.

38:31
It’s in Cognos.

38:32
Some of you folks could be pretty familiar with it.

38:34
It’s out there.

38:34
It’s one of our FM models.

38:37
It’s going to be under the great outdoors data.

38:40
We chose this one because it’s a relatively complex report compared to just doing a list report.

38:47
We need to start find the debt trail.

38:48
This where we start.

38:50
We know we need to recreate this if we’re only tackling this one first.

38:53
We’ve got to head to the web, we’ve got to go to Cognos Analytics, we’ve got to start pulling out our absolute 100% distinct list of things we need to start recreating.

39:02
So the journey starts here.

39:05
This not the full, full visibility though.

39:07
There’s not everything is not on one screen.

39:10
We have to do some digging.

39:11
So we’ve got the query itself.

39:14
So the users created their queries, which, so there’s opportunity in those queries for things like filters that now have to be a filter that’s an interactive filter in our Power BI or Tableau, we’ve got all of the different fields that need to be added as measures.

39:31
We’ve got all of these that need to be captured.

39:35
And even after that, we still have more places for debt to live.

39:42
So not only can you go create your query that has its default aggregation, but you also have to go get the aggregation at the visual level because they can change that.

39:51
So in Power BI is or you know, Tableau, as we’re going to create our measurements so that they can go and recreate these reports, we need to have everything done, which means we have to go to every single possible permutation of what could be changed within these reports.

40:07
Something to help some of the folks that are out there, and I know this one of the big pieces I wanted to at least throw out is that Cognos does have a report dependency audit.

40:19
You can go grab this and figure out if I’m moving a report, what other reports can I potentially move alongside?

40:26
What reports are dependent on the package that I’m moving.

40:29
So we know we’ve got the objects from a report.

40:32
We’ve got the package that were depended on, which is obviously dependent on the FM model.

40:37
But if we can get in there and get a buy one, get one free effort, figure out some low hanging reports that we could potentially migrate this reports going to give you an answer.

40:47
This only shows reports that have been run against a package.

40:52
So if there’s something about there that are in development haven’t been finished yet, they’re not going to be here.

40:56
That’s OK.

40:57
This should give us opportunity.

40:58
We should be able to take this time, reach out to our end users, figure out if they potentially need to migrate something as well.

41:04
And now you’re building out your backlog as we look at this.

41:07
So what’s next?

41:09
If you’re already building a semantic model, it would be great if you could be proactive and tackle other measures and other tables that need to be in that semantic model to fill, to fill more than one purpose moving forward.

41:23
Best case scenario, they say, no, we don’t need that report migrated.

41:26
And now you’ve just eliminated, you’ve eliminated the things you’ve got to move over time.

41:30
So if we’re starting with our priority reports, figure out what else can be moved at the same time, that also means you can start building that proactive next phase for those other teams that you’re going to support.

41:42
And it’s better to stay ahead of this than it is to figure out afterwards.

41:46
So try to be proactive if possible.

41:49
So outside of that, we now know what package we need to run.

41:54
So our package has once again, more measures that need to be created wherever we’re going.

42:00
We may not be surfacing the actual raw fact tables.

42:03
We’re going to be potentially making explicit measures wherever we’re going.

42:07
So we need to go get our raw tables for our new models.

42:09
We need to get the relationship for the new models, and we also need to go get our semantic logic for our new models as well.

42:18
So if we’re in the process of grabbing a semantic model, one of the quick ways and this just something to think about.

42:25
We’ve got quite a bit of customization we can handle in Cognos.

42:28
We’ve got merged query subjects.

42:30
We can handle some pretty complex sequel behind the scenes that fortunately, through just proper curation, it’s generating that, you know that native sequel by itself, it’s generating that Cognos sequel behind the scenes leverage that if you can, it’s kind of keys the castle and it’s this piece right here.

42:48
I know most of you are familiar with this, but if you’re in the process of moving to a new ecosystem, it would make sense to take this logic that’s not going to generate this complex Cognos sequel for you.

43:00
This the logic we need to use for our transformation.

43:02
And one of the biggest things we talked about is trying to move the transformation as far upstream as possible.

43:07
I think it’s Roche’s maxim.

43:10
Ideally, we’re trying to move as much transformation close to the warehouse as possible.

43:15
I know one of the reasons why Cognos has been so popular for so long is that there it gives us the opportunity to do this complex transformation without having to have access to the warehouse.

43:24
So granted you do have access to the warehouse, see if you can get some of this moved upstream, because the new platforms you’re going to may not be as good as Cognos.

43:32
That transformation, on the other hand, if you’re moving something like Fabric, this going to be your notebooks that you’re writing.

43:38
You’re going to be converting this over and I have to make this plug in there.

43:42
If you are going to Fabric right now, the degenerative AI behind Copilot is going to be open AI GPT.

43:52
So, 4O which is out there, is phenomenal at transforming this Cognos sequel into one notebooks or two Power query, depending on how you’re doing it.

44:06
So if you are looking at fabric and you don’t have access to Copilot today, the four O model is probably one of the best models I’ve seen so far.

44:15
And I’ve been testing them out over the years to make sure to see where they’re at.

44:19
It’s probably the best as we’re standing.

44:21
So knowing all of these things, we’ve tried to do what we can to expedite this process.

44:26
We really as a team, when we’re trying to do migrations, folks don’t pay us and hire us because they want to be our best friends.

44:33
They usually hire us because they want to do things faster.

44:36
So part of why untangling at the kind of by hand way it’s not incredibly efficient.

44:43
It’s a ton of Ropin things together, too many places to go.

44:48
So we’ve sat down as a team over the past few years and our Cognos architects have put together our internal tools that we use.

44:55
So we have migration assistant tools and the intent is that we’re really, we want to get this done in a fraction of the time.

45:01
We’d rather, we know you all can go in and do a lot of the stuff by hand.

45:04
So if there’s going to be any sort of benefit from tag teaming this with somebody else, you’d hope that they’re going to be able to do a little bit more efficiently.

45:11
So as we work through these migrations, we’re lucky to have these internal, internal tools that were built out by our Cognos architects.

45:18
And they’re really designed to be used by folks that have a range of Cognos experience.

45:24
It’s not just that you don’t have to be a Cognos architect to use these.

45:28
So I wanted to at least show you guys this because we get people to say what’s the differentiator?

45:32
What is actually, what are you guys doing?

45:34
What’s different?

45:36
Yeah, they usually say, what tools do you bring?

45:38
That’s one of the things that in every single conversation we have is you know what, what would be different?

45:42
This a big factor in this.

45:43
So instead of tracking things down and kind of go through that process of every single ecosystem within Cognos and having to go backtrack and go from one thing to another to another, we tried to consolidate it into one space.

45:56
So in this case, I know we’re bringing sales manager.

45:59
It’s highlighted in green.

46:01
I also know that my Go data warehouse query is what it’s leveraging, which now means I’ve got, you know, those other 4 reports from the Cognos audit report.

46:10
We’ve got them in one spot.

46:12
And So what we can do is we can quickly just drill through and get our report query items.

46:17
This once again, that’s the distinct list of all of our measures, all of our, you know, all of the points that are being reported on.

46:25
And then that goes from that list, we can expand it out.

46:29
And essentially this every object that has to be tracked down.

46:33
But instead of tracking it down, we can nail the lineage on the next page.

46:37
And that lineage is what tells us everything from the raw table to the semantic view, you know, to the business view.

46:45
So we’ve got the database view, the FM model, and we’ve got it all the way up to the report.

46:49
So it’s the lineage all the way back from the report to the database.

46:55
The last part is just capturing out those relationships.

47:00
And this one of the reasons why I think this something I’m kind of passionate about talking about is because before I had any understanding of Cognos, right?

47:09
I’m a Power BI guy by trade.

47:12
And the first time I came across this, I didn’t, I had no Cognos experience.

47:16
Like there’s 0 Cognos background and I was able to migrate reports to Power BI using this.

47:22
Like this the only thing I had access to.

47:25
I didn’t even have Cognos.

47:26
Like I didn’t have access to Cognos.

47:28
I wasn’t even connected, I think, to a Cognos environment.

47:31
So I just want to repeat that part 0 Cognos experience.

47:36
I didn’t know anything.

47:37
I didn’t even think I knew what a package was at that time and was able to take the output of what this has.

47:44
And I was able to build the reports I needed to build.

47:48
And then once I was able to get Cognos back and wasn’t able to get the actual access to the platform, I was able to use those the list reports that I was rebuilding to validate my data against them.

47:57
So I don’t know, it’s just kind of, it’s interesting because it’s having the blend of both.

48:02
I mean, not even both.

48:03
We’ve got three sets, you know, we’ve got our Cognos Architects or Parvia Architects and then our Tableau architects.

48:08
And it’s nice to know that they’re aware of what we need to make our moves when we do.

48:14
And of course, these things don’t, even if you were migrating to some of the newer Cognos technologies, these things are still relevant.

48:21
So I’ll wrap up real quick and I’ll let you know for anybody who is interested in more of like the technically crunchy back end of what I was talking about earlier.

48:29
I did do a quick walkthrough, not, you know, didn’t go down the big fabric route with, you know, notebooks and anything like that.

48:37
But I did go ahead and throw together an example of what migrating using a data flow would look like.

48:43
So that’s in the back half of this deck for me is interested.

48:46
And then from there, I’m going to pass it off back to Steve SRP.

48:51
All right, thank you, Devin.

48:53
Thank you.

48:53
Before we head into Q&A, just a little bit more housekeeping.

48:58
So #1 you know, stay, extend or go, right?

49:01
As Devin said, there are lots of options.

49:04
Companies choose to go many ways.

49:06
Senturus has a lot of options for you in terms of ways we can help out.

49:10
If you’re staying on Cognos, we’ve got a dedicated Cognos practice that can provide support to existing versions of Cognos, assist with upgrades, optimizations, customizations if you’re extending.

49:23
If you’re interested in bridging your data up to other platforms, as Devin said, we’ve got the Senturus Analytics Connector, which can really help you maximize the value of those existing Cognos models and bring that data into other tools.

49:37
We also have the Migration Assistant, which helps jump start ROI and we can assist in many, many ways with actually accelerating your migration to a newer platform.

49:49
So if you’re ready to go, if you’re ready to move to a new platform, as I said, lots of options, everything from a quick start.

49:56
We offer migration assessments to help.

49:58
Can I get your hands around what this big thing is and help you narrow things down to what really doesn’t need to be migrated?

50:08
We can assist you with the foundational start to your migration where we help move an existing model or some existing reports across.

50:16
As Devin said, you can leverage a generative AI for some pieces of a migration and there are places where AI is really suitable.

50:24
Devin gave the kind of quickly gave you the description of using generative AI to do a conversion from SQL to Power Query.

50:32
That’s a great example of where AI shines there.

50:36
To be frank, there are lots of places where AI does not shine yet, but there are places where it can really help you along the path to your migration.

50:44
And from there we can help all the way through the end of the migration.

50:48
So as you expand bring more and more of your data and reports across to a new platform, we can help carry you to the finish line.

51:00
One other thing I don’t want to miss out on is events and resources.

51:04
If you visit our resources page at senturus.com.

51:07
Number one, I want to re emphasize that Devin has bonus material in today’s deck.

51:12
You’ll find that deck on the resources page.

51:14
So definitely be sure to download today’s slide deck.

51:18
We also have an upcoming webinar for those of you who are thinking or contending to stay on Cognos never going to give you up, that’s coming up.

51:26
So look for an announcement about that soon.

51:30
We also have recordings of prior webinars related to some of the topics we’ve discussed here today, ways to use Cognos with RBI and Tableau, recommendations for how to roll out Power BI if you’re a Cognos shock, and a whole wealth of other information available in our Knowledge Center.

51:49
Quick bit about Senturus.

51:51
We provide a full spectrum of analytic services and enablement addition to proprietary software accelerators to help accelerate bimodal BI and migrations.

52:01
We shine in hybrid BI environments and we would love to help you with your needs.

52:07
We’ve been in business for over 20 years, almost 1500 clients and over 3000 projects.

52:14
Probably recognize some of the company names there, so if you might even be from some of the companies on the screen.

52:21
All right, with that, let’s jump into Q&A.

52:23
While we’ve got a few minutes remaining, let me take a look at the question panel here.

52:29
So there are some Cognos questions and there’s some Power BI questions.

52:33
So I’m going to tackle some of the Cognos stuff here first, then I’m going to have Devon and maybe Pedro jump in for some of the Power BI specific stuff.

52:44
So one of the Cognos questions comes from Alex.

52:47
He asks about whether Cognos is going to be sunset after 2025.

52:52
So you all may remember back earlier in the webinar, Devin had a slide up about how Cognos 11.2.4 is going to be reaching end of support.

53:01
Cognos 11.2.4 is the current long term support version of Cognos.

53:04
It’s not the final version of Cognos.

53:07
IBM has not yet announced the sunset date for version 11.2.4, but it’s widely expected that will happen in 2025.

53:18
Cognos 12 has already been released, and by the time IBM announces final sunset dates for 11.2.4, they will have a long term release of Cognos 12, which likely will go for a few more years.

53:32
Just to be clear for everybody, IBM has no current stated plans to end Cognos as a product.

53:39
So Cognos is not going away, it’s just a matter of what versions are currently supported by as the company.

53:50
All right, we’ve got another Cognos question from Keith.

53:54
He says Cognos was purchased with a perennial license and you wants to know how many users will be running Cognos without maintenance during the transition.

54:04
Now that is it’s really a situational question.

54:07
So if you’re moving off of Cognos and you’ve decided to end support and we do see companies, we see companies choosing to drop IBM support, which has certain impacts.

54:20
And those impacts being you no longer get upgrades you no longer get fixed packs.

54:25
And obviously you can’t reach out to IBM for support, but you can still continue using your current Cognos license and your current version.

54:33
So that is one option.

54:35
And as far as how many users you’re running in that case during a transition, it’s really a matter of your internal needs.

54:41
What we do recommend is if you’re dropping Cognos support, we really encourage you to freeze all new development in Cognos.

54:50
We here at Senturus offer support services.

54:52
So you can always leverage us for ad hoc support if you’re not maintaining IBM support.

54:57
You can also leverage us as an extension to IBM support even if you do have IBM support in place.

55:05
But the question of how many users is really a question of how you’re doing your transition.

55:11
And then we see a lot of companies over time reduce the number of interactive users in Cognos as they move everybody to a new platform, but keep certain things, some of the workhorse stuff in Cognos, as Devin mentioned, stuff like bursting or scheduled list reports.

55:27
And often you can do that with a smaller number of users.

55:33
All right, let’s go to a couple of Power BI questions here before we wrap up.

55:41
So one question, Here you go.

55:43
Devin, this one’s for you.

55:45
Don’t do it.

55:45
Here you go.

55:47
So Tim asks or Tim.

55:49
Tim says, OK, we’ve got large recording packages that are built in Cognos Framework manager.

55:54
We see that all the time.

55:55
We see giant monolithic models with a whole bunch of packages.

56:01
So Tim says we’ve got this, we’ve got large packages, about 150 plus tables that’s designed for the entire enterprise to use it.

56:10
Is there a way to duplicate that kind of functionality using pre joins and modeling and share it out widely in something like Power BI?

56:19
So I’m going to let you take that, Devin, you know, I see people using premium or I saw people using premium doing that.

56:25
And the problem with that, trying to go that full one to one.

56:31
Cognos does some phenomenal things like role-playing dimensions.

56:36
So when you go to Power BI, like by default one to one, you’re not there.

56:40
You’ve got to you got to figure out which role-playing dimensions are you’re going to have to create those.

56:44
And we see folks with packages and stuff really curating who gets what.

56:49
So yeah, you could make, you know, just these giant models and what these 150 tables I’ve seen models that are you know that it’s kind of enterprise scale.

56:58
You have to stop and think like how does that impacting the potential reporting piece too, because depending on how you’re doing the ingestion steps, there’s a cost somewhere.

57:09
And that cost if you’re going fabric and you’re doing, you know, if you’re going on the fabric route, power be out of fabric and you’re using, you know, pretty large models set out through that lake house you’re doing directly, But you know, there’s that compute cost of that.

57:22
And I’ve seen users try to blow, you know, have tables that kind of blew up the utilization for the day.

57:28
And that was unfortunate, but if you’re doing it on an import where you’ve got one big super monolithic import model, you’ve got to have, you know, workspace dedicated to that and every single person have access to that workspace.

57:39
So I think the answer is yes, you can.

57:43
It’s usually not the route we see with, you know, people who have a lot of success.

57:47
We usually see them pairing those larger models down into workspaces dedicated to a smaller slice of that data.

57:55
And I think that’s where often people, folks go over time after going with the monolithic model.

58:01
So there’s definitely, I’m seeing use cases where we’ve had one giant model with a billion and a half tables that are in there and everybody had access to everything.

58:10
I’ve also seen less go down the route, which is more often than not with my with those kind of curated data sets, because once you start doing things like bringing in extra row level security, it’s also it gets harder to extend those large models over time too.

58:26
And I think one of the things Pedro brings up is that just like with a lot of the other platforms doing things like changing a column, what single column may break a report that’s been built within a curated data set.

58:38
So, you know, breaking one report versus breaking everybody’s report makes a little bit more dynamic if you can work with smaller sets.

58:45
But I’ve seen it done both ways, but I see the majority going down the route with smaller bite size models.

58:52
When I say bite size, I mean 50 tables, not 150 tables.

58:55
It can go, you know, all the way down to five.

58:57
But yeah, just a reduction.

59:03
All right, Thanks, Devin.

59:04
So we’re at the top of the hour.

59:05
I’m going to do one more question here.

59:07
And for those of you, we’ve got a bunch of questions coming in.

59:09
So just so everybody knows, if we didn’t get into your question here Live Today, we will send out responses to you after the show.

59:15
So don’t worry that we’re missing your questions.

59:19
One last question that came in earlier, Mario asked, he heard that Power BI has a 1,000,000 row retrieval limit and wants to know if that’s true.

59:29
He mentions that he’d been doing some really heavy data lifting in Cognos, which I assume was probably more than a million row retrieval to extract that data into Excel files.

59:39
So are there any limitations on the Power BI/fabric side, Devin, for extracting directly out of Power BI?

59:46
Absolutely, Yeah, there are.

59:48
There’s a limitation on exporting data out.

59:50
If you’re exporting data out, I’d recommend setting up pagination or setting up.

59:58
Yeah, not paginate, Yeah, paginate report, because you can take paginate reports out, if I recall, not a limit.

1:00:05
So if you generate an Excel file off a paginate report, dump that into a location, people can access it.

1:00:11
But yeah, you’ve got a limitation on the amount of data you can pull out of a visual at any given time.

1:00:15
And it does.

1:00:17
It does give people a little bit of a.

1:00:21
Frustrated head scratch when they realize that’s the case, but that is usually it.

1:00:25
We’re not usually using Power BI as an extraction tool from a visuals.

1:00:29
That’s I think where the challenge runs into.

1:00:35
All right, thank you, Devin.

1:00:37
So with that, we’re going to go ahead and wrap up here for the day.

1:00:40
Thank you, thank you everyone for attending.

1:00:42
It’s always great to have you here, Devin Pedro, thank you for presenting, giving us all of your expertise.

1:00:49
It’s great to have both of you here too.

1:00:52
You can always reach out to us at Senturus.com.

1:00:55
Check out our website.

1:00:56
You can reach us through the website.

1:00:58
You can reach us by e-mail [email protected].

1:01:01
We even have an 800 number out there if you want to call and have a friendly chat.

1:01:05
We’d love to hear from you.

1:01:08
Thank you again for attending today, and we hope to see all of you on a future Senturus webinar.

1:01:14
Have a great day everybody.

1:01:16
Thanks.

1:01:17
Thank you.

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