Having BI tools operate independently defeats the goal of modern BI: fast, unified decision making based on secure, accurate data. The lack of integration is costing companies time-to-action and competitiveness. And that’s exactly what’s happening with Cognos running alongside Power BI or Tableau. Or both.
In this on-demand webinar, see a demo of the Senturus Analytics Connector, an easy drag-and-drop solution for integrating these powerful and distinct tools. We show you how the Analytics Connector allows Power BI and Tableau to easily tap the secure, curated data in Cognos. It’s a powerful modern BI pairing both IT and business users can appreciate.
Learn about
- Simple drag-and-drop functionality that eliminates time-consuming data remodeling efforts.
- How the Analytics Connector results in improved security, data accuracy and overall Power BI/Tableau performance.
- Features that further reduce query waiting times and boost performance.
Presenter
Arturo Ayala
Lead Software Developer
Senturus, Inc.
Arturo brings close to a decade of software development experience—plying his craft in the restaurant and office management sectors along with healthcare and blockchain space. After working with a wide array of software products, he’s now the Lead Developer of the Senturus Analytics Connector.
Read moreMachine transcript
1:44
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Senturus webinar on Drag and Drop of Cognos data and the Power Bi and Tableau. Thanks for joining us today. A little bit of administrative stuff before we get started. So if you could go on to the next slide there for me, Arturo, first up, if you have any questions that come up during the webinar, you can go ahead and type them into the Q&A panel. We’ll see those as we’re going along.
2:12
And at the end of the session, we’ll do a kind of a live Q&A. And so if you type your questions then as we’re going along, we’ll answer some of those questions at the end of the session. Today, a matter of fact, we already have one question in here, TG, I apologize if I’m mispronouncing that asks whether the recording will be shared. And the answer is yes, there will be a recording of the webinar available on our website. Beyond that, another common question.
2:39
Is can I get a copy of the slide deck? And the answer is yes. So if we go into the next slide here, there’s a link you can go to senturus.com/resources and you’ll find the deck there. Heather from our events team has also posted that link into the chat, actually a direct link in the chat for downloading the slide deck for today’s presentation. So go ahead and grab that if you like.
3:06
Quick overview of our agenda for today. We’ll start out with some introductions. Following that, we’ll do an overview of the analytics connector, what it is, kind of how it works. Arturo will take us through a live demo so you can see the tool in action. We’ll cover some frequently asked questions about the connector, do a quick overview of Senturus and some of our available resources. And as I said, at the end we’ll do a Q&A to answer your questions.
3:35
Before we get started, some quick introductions. So our presenter today, Arturo Ayala. Arturo is our lead software developer on the connector product. He is the expert in all things connector here. So if you do proceed with exploring the connector further, you’re almost certain to have one or more conversations with Arturo. So Arturo, thanks for being here today to be our presenter. I’m Steve Reed Pittman, director of Enterprise Architecture and engineering here at SENTURUS.
4:04
And I’m here mostly for intros at Arturo. Arturo is really going to be the expert on today’s session. So before we get into the meet of the presentation, I went around a couple of quick polls. So let me go ahead and start this first one up for you. And so the first question is, which BI platforms is your organization currently using? Cognos, Power Bi, tableau. Others? We occasionally find folks who are using things like click.
4:31
So, yeah, just let us know what platforms you’re using right now. Looks like we’ve got quite a few answers here. Not surprisingly, almost all of you are using Cognos. We would expect that for a tool that gives you access to Cognos data, quite a lot of you on the power BI side, 74% showing up so far and about 60% of you are Tableau folks, 11% are others. So I’m going to go ahead.
5:00
And close out the poll here and share the results so you can all see where we are. So yeah, it looks like a good chunk of you were using power BI, although Tableau is not too far behind. We’ve got 58% of you on Tableau, 10% using other tools. All right. So we’re going to do one more quick poll and then we’ll head into.
5:23
The presentation. So for the second poll, the question is how large is the tableau and or power BI community within your organization? So less than 50, 51 to 250, more than 250 or you’re not sure. So as the answers are coming in here, wow, quite a lot of you have a big user bases about half of you so far showing up with more than 250 users.
5:52
I’ll just let you keep answering here for just a little bit longer. Make sure everybody gets a chance to enter their answers and I’m going to go ahead and close that out and share the results with you. So yeah, just under 50% of you have pretty large user bases, quite a few of you in that 51 to 250 kind of midsize range and some of you also in smaller environments.
6:22
Thank you for your answers on that. I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing this. And with that, I am going to hand it over to Arturo to take us through the details of the connector. So take it away, Arturo. Thanks, Steve. You can hear me. All right, just Mic check real quick. Yep, you sound great. All right, great. Well, hey, everyone, my name is Arturo. I’m happy to be here to discuss the analytics connector and its role in your business intelligence efforts.
6:49
So let’s dive right in. I want to take a look at this diagram here. Everyone here started their journey somewhere on this timeline. Some started closer to the left, some closer to the right, but we’re all headed to the same place and that place is somewhere we can use all the tools we want with the data we need back in the day. You see, Cognos it’s pretty prominent on the timeline. It checked all the boxes for our BI needs and there’s a reason it’s been around for a long time as built in security.
7:18
Great reporting, rigid modeling and other features that made it a great choice, and for the most part, it still is. But as time progresses, things change, right? With the introduction of new tools such as Power BI and Tableau, and the ecosystems that they’re a part of, the BI game has changed. You can see the Cognos logo become a little smaller over here as we move towards the present, and that’s because they have to share the limelight with these new tools. With these new tools, users could suddenly connect to a database.
7:45
Or upload an Excel file and start tinkering around immediately. They can take the data into their own hands, which is great. But if your data is in Cognos, it’s not as easy. A change to a Cognos model has to go through validation, and it may take a while. And that’s part of why these tools are so popular. It gives the user more power. But what if it could be as easy as working with your Cognos data as it is with other data in Power BI and Tableau?
8:11
The connector, and its simplest definition, is a bridge between data and Cognos and these BI tools. A lot of people are going to recognize the screenshot. It’s framework manager. You or someone in your organization has spent a lot of time here. I guarantee it. They were building the models driving the data that you rely on to make decisions. Now, for those unfamiliar with framework manager, it’s basically a Cognos utility that lets you create models based on data sources that you define. And it’s these models that become the backbone of the packages.
8:41
That you manipulate in Cognos analytics. Now, this job takes a deep knowledge of the data and lots of validation to make sure the models are up to par. After all, reports are based on this data and business decisions are based on the reports. The problem with introducing new tools like Power BI and Tableau is that they don’t have access to these Cognos models. Here’s another screenshot framework manager. You can see some of the ERD diagrams representing the different models. There’s a lot going on.
9:11
Relationships are being made, new calculations are being added, points of data are being transformed into something meaningful, and this is the data you want to work with when building your reports and dashboards across the board. Now, it’s very common to have a layer of logic on top of your database begin to this whole notion of different layers, such as the business and presentation layer, which is prevalent in Cognos modeling. A lot of thought goes into it, and it’s this investment that makes your Cognos environment so valuable now.
9:40
There’s different approaches to solving the problem. The connector tackles. Here are two different approaches. The top approach of this top arc in this diagram here is that one can simply access the databases driving your models in Cognos via your favorite BI tool. The problem with this that any logic you build in Cognos is disregarded. You would have to recreate some of that logic or metadata to make this a viable option. Another could be to use Cognos as a sort of ETL tool.
10:08
And extract any needed information via a CSV dump. This is the bottom part of the diagram and an interesting point here Senturus we found that some clients top five reports are solely for this purpose. Now in my opinion this is probably the best strategy apart from using the connector, but it’s hard to automate. You can automate the CSV dump generation but then you have to manually upload that data into your tool of choice.
10:34
And that could also lead to violating some security measures, which we’ll talk about a little later. Any other solution to this problem has a problem that you’re not able to leverage all the hard work you did in framework manager to create the models in the 1st place. Ultimately, we don’t want to circumvent this layer of logic in Cognos. What we really want here is an error going straight from Cognos to the user, and that’s what the connector is. That’s that bridge that I mentioned earlier now.
11:04
You can recreate the metadata and do the remodeling, but why should you? While it may be your only option in some scenarios, you generally don’t want to go down this route. For one, you compromise data integrity. These remodeling efforts and recreating of metadata are a big lift, and the bigger they are, the more error prone they are. Because of everything that’s involved, you also compromise data security. Any security you built in via Cognos authorization is no longer counted on.
11:33
To me, the most important is that it’s time consuming. You’re essentially reinventing the wheel, recreating the models, recreating the metadata when you don’t really have to. Last, you’re creating data styles. Or you could create data styles. You know one user group may have one subset of the data and another may have another, and they manipulate it in different ways and they come together and you know they reach different conclusions and you never want that, right?
12:00
So the question becomes, how do we do it? How do we solve this problem? Well, Cognos is our source of truth, so let’s keep it that way. And it’s something that can be achieved with the analytics connector. A user can access their data in a way similar to that of report Studio and Cognos Analytics, but leveraging their favorite BI tool and the expertise that comes with that ecosystem. Now here in the screenshot, you see both Tableau on the right and Cognos Analytics in the report studio on the left.
12:30
We see that we have our go sales query package selected and you see how it breaks down into the different query subjects and query items and measures. In Tableau you can see we have the same package selected and how the items in the table section match what you see in report studio. The connector basically converts our packages into databases, query subjects and the tables and query items and measures and facts into columns. So Tableau and Power BI for that matter.
12:59
Know what to do with it. It’s really easy to see your data the way you expect. All that effort that went into your Cognos models is persisted across reporting tools. Basically all the work, all the hard work you did in Cognos isn’t lost when using the analytics connector. With the connector serving as you bridge the Cognos, you can start adopting the reporting tools you want with the data models you need. Now I’ll be performing a demo like Steve mentioned, show you how easy it is to use the connector. But wait, there’s more.
13:29
So the connector even lets you run your Cognos reports with or without parameters. Here in this screenshot you see a report that asks for a year prompt and can mimic that in Tableau as well. And the important part about this is that sometimes reports have additional logic that your FM model doesn’t reflect, and it could be doing a lot of complex joins or calculations to reach the final result set. And maybe that final result set is used as an extract or a CSV dump like I mentioned earlier.
13:59
And I mentioned there’s a manual step went with generating those CSV dumps. So instead of doing that manual step, you can simply use the connector and point it to the report and achieve the same thing. Now with the connector you can also leverage the power BI service and tableau server so you can publish your creations to these tools and share your data sets and reports across your organization. Using the connector you can create a data set that originates from Cognos.
14:29
They’re using tableau server or the server or the power BI service you can expose it to everyone else. We talked about not sacrificing integrity and security for agility in the last slide. You know, the fact that you can publish these data sets is huge. Gives your users instant access to your Cognos data and then environment that they’re accustomed to. Let’s rehash some of the things that you get with the connector for one get faster, more accurate reporting.
14:58
You can leverage all the work you’ve done in framework manager and get started building reports right out-of-the-box. There’s also reduced change management, cost and risk. You know, we’re still leveraging Cognos and all that offers. We’re only mixing in power BI or Tableau where and when it makes sense. There’s also an increased trust in data. You know, you put your framework manager model through its paces. You know it works, so let’s keep using it. It also improves security.
15:25
Any role level security you built in the Cognos will be reflected when using the connector and it reduces the risk associated with approaches such as the CSV dump. And by that I mean let’s say user A that you know has God Mode, you know it has access to everything, generates a CSV dump so you get all the data and they put it up on Dropbox or one drive or somewhere that where it’s easily accessible to the rest of the team and then comes along user B that.
15:54
Really should only see a subset of that data. Well, suddenly they can see everything and you know that’s the violation of security. And lastly, you get superior performance. You know Cognos knows our data and it’s optimized to handle it. So using the connector, we let it do the heavy lifting. The connector is up to version 5 three, and some of the new features that have been built are that, well, we shifted our.
16:24
Connecting strategy. Before we used to have a custom connector and now we leverage Power BI and Tableau’s built in SQL Server connector and that offers higher compatibility and a simplified and streamlined setup for the user. We also added support for the Power BI Gateway and Power BI report server and you can use Windows authentication so you know you don’t have to type in as many passwords and usernames.
16:51
Also, the Connector’s installer now let’s you select Amazon Corretto as your JRE distribution. Sometimes users or companies take issue with Oracle’s licensing structure, so instead of we take Oracle out of the equation and you don’t have to worry about that. And of course, we’ve also added some bug fixes and performance enhancement. So now we’ve talked a lot about the connector. Let’s see it.
17:21
In use, let me end the presentation here and share my desktop and we’ll start with Power BI. All right, so here we’re in Power Bi. First thing you have to do is connect to the connector. We can either use this get data button over here or import data from SQL Server over here. Select that and you’ll have to type in the server that hosts your connect.
17:51
Here is in Senturus We have it on a VM called Internal BI one, so I’ll connect to that and select direct query for our connectivity mode. Hit OK now normally you would have been prompted for your login credentials and these are the same credentials you used to log into Cognos analytics and I’ll showcase that once we demo in Tableau right now.
18:18
But here you see that we’re connected to our server and you see a bunch of items here. So what are these? These are basically packages that have been converted to databases so power BI can understand. For this demo, we’re going to select the sales query package, which is a subset of the great outdoor sales package, which is comes bundled with your Cognos installation. We’re going to select a couple dimensions branch.
18:47
Order method products or fact table cells in this time dimension so we have some date information and you see here this preview on the right so we hit load once we have our table selected and power BI right now is communicating with the connector they requested metadata about these tables or query subjects that we selected. And here now they’re loaded on.
19:20
Right under here on the data pane and before we get started building our report, we do need to do a modeling exercise. Now you may be asking yourself, hey, I’ve already done this in framework manager, and yes that’s true, but Power Bi doesn’t know about that. They don’t know. Power Bi doesn’t know how these tables interact with each other and this modeling exercise is going to allow it to know so.
19:47
Here I mentioned sales are facts. Hey, we got here in the middle one. Once we finish this modeling exercise, it should look like a star should resemble star steamer for those that are familiar with that. So I’m going to click on this AAA link and drag it over a AAA link over here and just a quick note about AAA link. So like I mentioned, you know everything that you’ve done in framework manager is persisted over here on the power BI side and Tableau aside.
20:17
Through this AAA link, it’s basically a substitute for everything you’ve done in framework manager. So I’m going to set up these relationships, draw one too many, and now something I’m going to point out right now is that these relationships are actually simplified compared to what?
20:47
Is done in framework manager and I’ll show you what the framework manager relationships look like right now in a minute. You can see that this is actually is a pretty easy exercise compared to what happened. Okay. So while that validates here, I have framework manager and I have it zoomed in, zoomed out by a lot just so you can see everything that’s happening. But if you see these lines, hopefully you can make it out.
21:16
But these are all the relationships that go into this package, this model. So as you can see, I don’t know, I see like at least 100 lines here and over here we only have 4. So here we’re done with this modeling exercise which is a one time thing and we can go back to building our reports. This package that we’re using is basically those data that can be broken down by product.
21:45
Location and time. So I’m going I want some insight onto where these cells are happening. So I’m going to go here and click this country property. This is going to bring up a map here. So with this actually just went back to our Cognos server and it queried for this country property and here we see these little bubbles that correspond to the countries that we have sales data for. But let’s make them a bit more meaningful and.
22:15
Have them represent the amount of revenue. So I’m going to go here and click this revenue and then you’ll see that these, bubbles grow depending on the amount of sales for that country. They’re not formatted all that great, so I’m going to just make them currency a little easier to see and you can see that. Now I’m going to add another visual here. I want to get a bit more granular and break down these sales by product, so.
22:44
Give me one second while I do this real quick. I’m going to rename this. It’s the product hierarchy, and the hierarchy is just a way of structuring our data so the products can be broken down by product type, product line, and then the product itself. So where’s that’s hierarchy?
23:31
Oh, that’s what I did. Let me delete this. I started with the wrong category. Delete the model. Yes, you going to start with product type. It’s down here. Nice. Let’s start over. Create this hierarchy. And actually, you know what? I’m getting mixed up. This product line then product type.
23:57
So let’s start over one more time and rename this. All right. So you got product lines, add products. There we go. That’s what I was looking for. And finally add product. I’m going to add this hierarchy here and you can see that our data, these are our different.
24:25
Products, they’re broken down by product line, product type. So we have our camping equipment, then cooking gear under that and then the actual products, these trail chef canteens and sets and things of the sort. So I want to see these sales information for this product. So I’m going to add our revenue and say planned revenue as well.
24:49
And let me format plan revenue just so we can see these dollar values and they’re a little easier to read, all right. And I want to see cells breaking down by one more metric, that’s by order method. So give me one second while I build this, out, it’s revenue down by year.
25:18
And then broken down by order method. So here you see the different lines that correspond to the cells for each order method. Now lastly I want to add a filter here just so we can see our cells by year. I’m going to add this slice it here and just made a change and you’ll see that these visuals update.
25:47
And what’s going on here is that power BI is formulating a query that is sending to the connector. The connector is transforming that into something the something Cognos can understand, sends it off to Cognos, waits for a response, and then it transforms that response into something power BI can understand and then sends it down. And then we see our updates here. Now let me return this to our full year.
26:11
And just one note about our sample data, the sample package was added a while back. So that explains the old dates. But we’ve added a lot of data here and you’re asking, you might be asking yourself, well, how do I know that this data is accurate? What I like to do is create what I’m the report that I’m going to create in power BI and then go into Cognos and in the report builder.
26:37
Create something similar or something that has these calculations and then just compare them. I have that here. So under new report let me minimize this so we can kind of compare that. But that you see here like in camping equipment summer revenue is 1 billion, 509 million and that number matches what we have here and so forth. And here actually the total you have four billion 686.
27:06
Million and that’s what matches up here. So this is just a quick way to validate what you see. But you can trust the the connector because it’s really just acting as a as a bridge to Cognos. So it’s not really doing any calculations, it’s just passing along messages. So this is something that can be achieved pretty quickly in Power BI. Let’s move on to tableau.
27:36
All right. And like I mentioned earlier, we shifted our strategy, so we used the SQL Server connector and here we have. We’re connecting to that same server now. I didn’t mention it, but the power BI we’re logged in with this account with cognosembed@senturus.com in order to show how the connector handles security.
28:00
We’re going to log in with a different account here, and we’re going to recreate the same report. So we’re going to log in with the Cognos Embed 2 account, let me log in. And again, these are the same credentials I would use to log into Cognos Analytics. So I’m going to select my sales query package here, and I’m going to go through the same modeling exercise that I did in Power BI because again, Tableau doesn’t know how these tables relate to each other. So I’m going to select branch here, actually.
28:33
I’m going to remove this and I’m going to add our fact table first cells and then I’m going to go ahead and add these dimensions, branch, order method, products and you know what? Actually I jumped to cognos see got to remove these as well. Tableau added this notion of logical and physical tables.
29:00
So I want to create one logical table with five physical tables. So now I’m going to add our dimensions, branch, order method, products, and time. You can see that Tableau actually created the relationships between our tables using that AAA link that I mentioned earlier. Now you could say Tableau’s a little smarter than power BI or.
29:28
But I’m not going to get into that argument there. So once we have our modeling exercise done, we can go over here to our sheet and start creating our report. So same thing, I’m going to add this country property over here and recreate that map here. You can see those bubbles and we’re going to add sales data to those bubbles and you can see some have gotten bigger, some smaller.
29:57
Now I’m going to add another sheet so we can add our visual where we talk about products. So all right. So first we have to create that hierarchy which is product line hierarchy. Create hierarchy call this product hierarchy. Now once we add this hierarchy to our.
30:29
Canvas over here. You’re going to see that security at work. So let me finish this product line, product type and then our product once I click product hierarchy here should see it on this side. There it goes.
30:49
So here you see that there’s actually only three product lines over here on the power BI side, this user had access to. Oops, try to minimize that didn’t work. So here we have 5 product lines. This user only has access to these three. I don’t know for what reason, but for demo purposes I guess. And you can see that same breakdown as in power BI. So let’s minimize this and add our cells.
31:20
And actually, let’s format this. But you can see how that security is just seamless. This is actually a data security filter that was added in framework manager to filter the other product lines for this user. And it just works, you don’t have to manage another.
31:46
Authentication API outside of Cognos to make this work. It just works. And that’s the beautiful part about it. All right, so we have our visual here breaking down sales by product and then we’re going to add our visual where we break down sales by order method. So let’s do that where’s here? And our time.
32:15
And then we’ll break down by order methods. Now in Tableau, it works a little bit different than in Power BI. You have to create a sheet for each visual and then you can create your dashboard. But more or less this is what we had in power BI. And then I’ll add that filter that we had here just so everything looks the same and you can see the visuals are being updated.
32:44
And just so we can compare our values here, I have a report in Cognos where I logged in with that Cognos embed 2 user and we can compare the numbers here. You know, personal accessories is the 1,000,000, a billion, 885 million and it’s what we see here. So just you know, quick validation that our numbers are looking right.
33:09
And then one thing I do want to mention, for the power BI service and tableau server earlier in the presentation, you can publish both of your creations here and that does take a couple of seconds. So I have these up already and I’m just going to point things out to you guys. So here I have that same report that I made in power BI and I’m viewing it through the power BI service. It’s pretty cool. Now you can share this across your organization, but what I think is even cooler is that.
33:38
You can also publish the data set that this report is based on and I have this here and you can see that your might need a refresh here. But you saw the tables that we selected over in the when we first started a power BI here. And the cool part is that you can create a report based on this data. So this is one data set that you can publish to the rest of your organization.
34:07
And someone else can use it to build a report or whatever it is that they need to do. So this is still going but there it goes though we have our visual here now. You can do the same thing in tableau and I have that set up over here just quick so we have our dashboard.
34:31
And while that loads, I’m going to go over here and show how I have the data set, the model that we created here in Tableau desk and you can create a new workbook based on that model. Just how you did in that’s how we did in the power BI service. And again, you know this is important because you.
34:58
Create that model once and then it’s available for the rest of your users. And one thing I want to point out here is that when you connect to your data set, you’re actually prompted for your credentials. So when we created a tableau server, we’re using the Cognos embed two account and we only saw those three product lines. I’m going to actually over here on this side and the dashboard. I’m going to log in with Cognos embed.
35:28
The other accounts and we’re going to sign in and we’re going to see our security at work because we’re going to see all the product lines instead of only the three that Cognos embed two had access to. So that’s the demo. Hope you guys enjoyed it. We’re going to go back to the presentation and continue there. We have some frequently asked questions that we’ve got ready for you guys. Let me see how we’re doing for time actually first we’re okay.
36:01
So the first slide with frequently asked questions on some of you may be aware that in Tableau and Power Bi, there’s two ways to get data. There’s a live and direct query mode, live and Tableau, Direct query and Power Bi. And what this means is that every time there’s a request for data, it goes over to the server and it pulls that data as opposed to extract mode in Tableau and import mode in Power BI.
36:27
It gets all the data at once and then it starts, you know, performing calculations operations on that big pool of data. Both methods are supported, but we do recommend live and direct query mode because it ensures the best results when you use extract and import mode. Some certain things have to be in place in order for it to work right. I won’t get too deep into it, but things like primary keys and foreign keys have to be exposed in your models.
36:55
To allow for the correct relationships to be made, and sometimes, well most of the times actually all the times, aggregated measures behave weirdly just because you need power BI and Tableau can’t deduce the aggregation level when in import mode. So there’s some little caveats there. But they’re all workarounds, so if you are interested in using extract import, we can talk about it at a later time.
37:23
As far as what versions of Cognos support Cognos, ten and up on Prem and cloud instances and basically support our data sources, whether that be our relational packages, DMR packages, cubes or data modules, let’s move on. The connector is a pretty mature product. It was released in 2016 and we’re up to version 5.3.5, which was actually released just a couple of days ago.
37:52
And it’s pretty lightweight as a product. It doesn’t take a lot, of resources. Now if you’re on a some i recent version of Power Bi and Tableau, which you should be, then you’re going to be okay. You’ll be able to connect using the analytics connector. The connector can also be set up in a Linux environment. It does take some extra setup, but it is possible in case that’s what you want to do.
38:22
One thing I’ll mention here is that it’s very common for people to have multiple environments. You know, a production environment, staging, testing, dev, all that stuff. We recommend one instance of the connector per environment. And also the connector doesn’t need to be installed in the on the same machine that Cognos is running. As long as the machine that you excuse me, that you choose to install the connector, can communicate with the machine running Cognos, you’ll be OK.
38:52
Now I do want to mention the Cognos environment impact Connect Analytics connector. Users are more interactive. You saw in Power Bi and Tableau, each of those visuals created a request to Cognos. So the load on your Cognos server is increased, but the connector does its best to summarize the queries to lessen the load. Overall, it’s an important step during.
39:21
The deployment of the connector to figure out if this is an issue or if it’s not and you know we can walk you guys through that as well. What’s the next slide? Security. As you saw in the demo, the connector automatically enforces security within your Cognos environment. So we had that example where user the Cognos embed to user only had access to a subset of those product lines.
39:50
And I’ve been mentioning framework manager a lot. Nothing special needs to happen on the FM side. If you publish your package, the connector can communicate with it. Want to get into the Tableau architecture really quickly? Not too, difficult here, but basically you have your Tableau client on the left side, whether it’s your Tableau desktop or Tableau Server, these clients are going to communicate with the analytics connector.
40:19
And then the connector in turn communicates with Cognos. And the power BI architecture is actually pretty similar, where the power BI desktop follows that same flow. But if you’re in power BI service, the service will communicate with your power BI gateway, and the gateway will then communicate with the connector and so on. So pretty similar, but there’s some subtle differences there. Now we talked a lot about what it’s like to have the connector.
40:47
And I want to take a look on the other side of the coin and talk about how things would be different if you didn’t have it. So without the connector, you have to look into remodeling your data. Now that effort could be a heavy one if your model is big and complicated, or it could be a smaller proposition, but still it’s work you wouldn’t have to do by using the analytics connector. Now depending how your remodeling efforts go, the trust in data may be there, but it may not. Now these Cognos models are complex and usually built over time.
41:16
If you get something wrong, it might skew all your data points, leading to a lack of trust in your data. Using the analytics connector, you’re leveraging the same models you’ve been using this whole time, and because of that you’ll have high confidence in any conclusions based on that data. Also, security would need to be rebuilt in power Bi, tableau, or whatever tool that is that you want to use using some kind of API. Using the connector. It’s something that you don’t have to worry about because that security is preserved.
41:45
Now, if you do choose to go the route where you create your models, recreate that metadata, you’ll need to rebuild the model first, right? And build out that security before you can actually get to report building. This is extra time that you need to take with the connector. You can start building reports right out-of-the-box. Lastly, without the connector, you may get into a situation where you have siloed data and we talked about it earlier where one team may use one steps to the other data one way, another team may use it a different way.
42:14
And each use, you know a different technology, making collaboration difficult with the connector. Everyone is using the tried and true Cognos models, and everyone’s on the same page because of it. Let’s talk about return of investment using the connector. You know, first and most importantly, you’re saving time. You’re not recreating the metadata, you’re not spending time converting reports outside of Cognos because you can run those same reports using the connector.
42:42
And you’re not having to maintain metadata, layers between tools. You’re also reducing your data security risk. Any security measures you baked into Cognos to get into compliance with different security standards, such as HIPAA, we’re all still there. You know, it gives you that Peace of Mind. And as you saw in the demo, it just works. You know, seamless. Third, you’re maximizing your Cognos investment. You know Cognos is your source of truth, and you’re still leveraging that truth.
43:12
And you ensure accurate and aligned business metrics. Remember, no one needed to remodel the data. You’re still using your Cognos models and everyone is going to be on the same page. Now a lot of people would be thinking about what the best strategy is moving forward. You can live in a world where you choose one product and stick with it. Now that could be Cognos or you can severitize with Cognos and adopt Power BI or Tableau for your reporting needs.
43:40
Those tools are mature enough that you could go down that route. Or maybe you want to take a bimodal approach and use all the tools and use them when and where it makes the most sense. Everyone’s situation is different, so there isn’t one right answer. What is right for everyone is using the analytics connector because it can be applied in any of these situations. Now let’s say that you are that you’ve made your mind up and the way I don’t want to use the Cognos anymore.
44:10
I just want to go over how the connector can and another Senturus technology can be used to accelerate your migration project. Using the connector you can create the report you want. That’s the top part of here of this diagram and that could be either a new report or recreating a report in Cognos. You then use the migration assistant to analyze that very report you created and rebuild a model to use in your power BI.
44:38
Or whatever tool that you that you decide to use. Then once you have your new model, it’s just a matter of pointing your new report to the new data set now at its root. This approach accelerates from migration project by making it as small as possible. You know the smaller the project, the less room for error, the more swiftly you can move. Just a quick overview of how you would use this as a migration accelerator, but that is the basic gist of it so.
45:08
If this does interest you or if you have any questions, please reach out and we can discuss. So here is where I’m actually going to pass the baton to my colleague Steve and and I’ll meet and I thank you guys for hearing me talk about the connector. Thanks Arturo and everyone. You’ll hear Arturo talk a little more in a bit when we get into our Q&A session. But First off.
45:35
We do have some case studies on our website and a reminder that you can download the deck using the link that’s in the chat panel. You can also find it just directly by getting the Senturus.com. But we do have some case studies out there showing you how actual companies in, you know, in the real world are using the analytics connector to meet their needs. If you are interested in test driving the connector, you can reach out to us.
46:03
For that we do offer a free 30 day trial which includes customer support throughout the trial. So we help you get the connector set up and we walk you through usage and issues you may have with getting your use cases met within your organization. So you can request a test drive at our website Senturus.com/products/analytics-connector.
46:27
You can also find additional resources on our site. We’ve been in this business for a long, long time, so we’ve got a lot of material out there. Blog posts, product reviews, quick tips, information on upcoming events. So check it out again. Senturus.com/resources is where you’ll find that info. We also have a few upcoming events next week, Thursday, April 6th, we’ve got a live round table.
46:54
On data integration, I’ll be running that with a few of our core data engineers here, so don’t miss that. And then a little later in the month we’ll chat with Pat, our own Pat Powers, doing a kind of informal live Q&A session on using Power query editor for data cleansing. So if that’s of interest to you, go to senturus.com/events and you can sign up for either or both of those.
47:23
So quick bit about Senturus. We are a modern bi company. We specialize in hybrid environments. We do modernizations and migrations across the entire BI stacked. As you can see, we spend a fair amount of time with the interactions between Cognos tableau and Power Bi. We’ve been in business for 22 years.
47:45
1400 Plus clients, over 3000 projects. So we’ve got a lot under our belt. Our team is big enough to meet your business analytics needs, but we’re also small enough to be able to provide you with some personalized service. So do reach out to us if we can be of any assistance with your BI environments. We are hiring, so if you’re interested, we’re looking for a senior data warehouse and Cognos BI consultant as well as a senior Microsoft BI consultant.
48:14
So if one of those roles is of interest to you can find more details and job descriptions on our website. You can also send your resume to us straight at jobs@senturus.com. And with that, we’re going to go ahead and drop into Q&A. So we’ve got quite a few questions that have come in here. So I’m just going to kind of run some of these by you.
48:39
Let me scroll through. So there is a question about using the connector with the DMR packages. Does the connector work with the DMR packages? And I think you spoke a little bit about the aggregation question with regard to live queries, but yeah, but maybe just a little about DMR. Yeah, short answer is yes, we support DMR packages like Steve mentioned when you’re in live and direct query mode.
49:06
There won’t be any issue with DMR packages. We have a lot of those measures that come aggregated, so it’s only an issue when you’re in extract or import mode. But we have some workarounds. But yeah, for the answers, yes, they’re supported. Thanks, Arturo. And there’s kind of a related question here about how Cognos security permissions are handled when a query is coming in through import mode versus a direct query.
49:36
Okay, yeah. So security is enforced the same in direct query mode and live mode, it’s enforced for every single query that gets sent to the connector. In import mode, it’s only enforced at the time of that import. So once you create that import or extract, you kind of have that big pool of data and whoever views that data.
50:02
Later, if they don’t have access to it, then you really can’t stop that. So yeah, hopefully that answers the question there. Great. There’s also a question about row level security and how that propagates, so I’m not exactly sure if I’m going to articulate this correctly, but the question is, does Cognos security propagate?
50:27
Into the same kind of row level security that a PBI data set has? Or might a user need to do additional row level security implementations and their power BI reports? Yeah, no. If you have the desired security row level security built in at the framework manager level or anywhere in Cognos, that’s going to be reflected in Power Bi and Tableau when using the connector.
50:52
So you wouldn’t have to rebuild any of that security on the power BI side or tableau side for that matter. Cool. We’ve got another question here about does the connector work with both dynamic and compatible query mode packages? Yes, it does. Yeah. So from our perspective, a package is a package is a package, so.
51:17
Yeah. So we use. So the connector actually can’t even tell whether it’s dqm or cqm, right, goes then and runs the query. We’ve got a question from Robert, can you use a Cognos data set and a data module? I think the answer to that is you wrap data sets and data modules, but you can probably answer it more completely than I can. Yeah. So I’ve talked a lot about packages, but.
51:43
When you map your packages to databases through our data source configuration tool, you actually have the ability to map a data module to a package to a database as well. So you. So yes they are supported. All right and let’s see what else do we have here. Ohh. David asked about speaking more about how you would use the connector as a migration assistant to move away from Cognos. So that was the last slide of course with you.
52:11
Shared before you handed it over to me, actually, maybe you just bring that slide back up from that Arturo and we can just, yeah, talk through that for a moment. Let me go. I think that was slide 31 in your deck. Yep. Let’s see. Yeah, David. So basically you would use the connector to have, you know, access to your Cognos models and you would recreate the report and power BI.
52:41
Then if you’re familiar with migration assistant, basically a profiling tool and it looks at your content store and looks at everything like at your audit store as well in Cognos and figures out what’s being used. So you would create that report and then the report that has all the data points that you want and then using migration assistant you take a look at it and you say, OK, well.
53:05
You know, I have 1000 data points in Cognos, but this report is only using, you know, 15 or 20 of them and that’s something you can achieve using the migration assistant. And at that point you have a subset of the data that you actually need to you know, export or move out of Cognos. So once you have that little bite size chunk of data you can go about migrating it out. That’s the basic quick overview of how that would work and.
53:34
Yeah. And I’ll just add a little bit on top of that. So we do find often that customers, you know, they choose to use the X connector essentially as a bridge for beginning their migrations because it’s a quick way to get access to the data that currently lives in Cognos to be able to pull that into power Bi and Tableau. But then if the ultimate goal is to migrate away from Cognos and to exclusively use one or more these other tools.
54:01
Then this approach that Arturo is describing is really helpful and it does leverage our migration assistance, which is actually a separate product. I mean, if you’re interested in that, you can reach out to us. So you can reach out to Scott Hilton through this calendar link there in the chat window if you’d like to learn a little bit more about the migration assistance and how it works to actually assist with migrating completely to a new platform if you are looking to sunset Cognos in your organization at some point.
54:32
All right. So with that, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap up for the day here. Thank you, everybody for attending. It’s always great to have you here on our webinars. Do keep an eye on our website for upcoming events. And also, as I said, for additional resources and information. If you’re interested in doing a test drive over the connector, do reach out to US, schedule a little stop there with Scott and he can get you set up.
54:59
And with that, thank you Arturo for your presentation today. Great to have you here of course and thank you everybody for attending. So have a great day and we hope to see you on the future’s Senturus webinar.
