Cognos?! Who Needs Cognos When You've Got a Watson!

IBM held a webinar today (January 29th, 2015) titled "IBM Watson Analytics for IBM Cognos Users. Here is my run down of what Big Blue had to show:

• Watson is an unstoppable beast... in slide decks: Every time I see a Watson presentation the visualizations look great and the marketing speak makes it sound like a game changer. However I have yet to see an actual demonstration of the damn thing.
• Cognos sure sounds boring: IBM gets positively tired whenever the conversation shifts to Cognos. You can tell how unexcited they are to sell things like "trusted source of data." Who needs trust when you've got a sweet graph!
• The Watson - Cognos integration does not exist: As per the slide deck, the current integration point between the two is that you take what you learned in Watson and send an email to someone in IT asking them to change something in Cognos to match your new insight. Awesome.

I had high(er) hopes for this presentation. Given the title I was expecting to see IBM's vision for how Watson and Cognos exist in an analytics ecosystem, or at least an outline of some integration points between the two. IBM had nothing to say about Cognos though other than to acknowledge its existence, which... whatever. Just another wasted opportunity from Big Blue so par for the course. 

More than anything I'd like them to actually demonstrate Watson in the hands of a highly skilled presenter. Because, as you'll see in a future post, my experience with the Watson "freemium edition" is less than stellar...