Why Aggregate Industries dropped 'inflexible, not easy to use' IBM Cognos for Qlik business intelligence

CIO Mike Gibbons says Qlik Sense ticked all the boxes for construction and building company

Construction and building materials firm Aggregate Industries replaced an IBM Cognos business intelligence platform with one from Qlik in a move CIO Mike Gibbons described as a "no brainer".

Aggregate Industries, which supplied all the concrete for the London 2012 Olympic Stadium, had previously been attempting to use IBM Cognos business intelligence, but Gibbons told Computing that "harnessing the platform to analyse data wasn't taking off within the organisation".

"We wanted to encourage a change of culture where our users and our business saw more value in our data assets, or actually even viewed them as an asset," Gibbons explained, adding that the nature of the business meant some users didn't see much value in the version of the data they were getting from IBM.

"We're an organisation that's very physical; we blast rock out the ground and we crush it and there's a value seen in those physical assets. But it's much harder for that perception to be translated to data."

Part of the problem, Gibbons suggested, was that IBM Cognos was "not easy to use", "inflexible" and "not easy to maintain". Nonetheless, Aggregate had deployed a total of 250 Cognos Cube modelling tools, which Gibbons explained had led to confusion among staff.

"We'd come up with several versions of the truth; and it was difficult to see which cube was giving us the real picture," he said. Aggregate Industries therefore decided to look for another tool and it was QlikView that ticked all the boxes for the company.

Gibbons described one of the initial advantages of using QlikView was that it helped Aggregate staff get around "the perception that a lot of data was flawed" following the previous IBM installation. Once that hurdle was overcome, QlikView allowed Aggregate staff to make better use of the data it had.

"The things that really made the difference was it was easy to use. It could handle large chunks of information and do it quickly," said Gibbons, who described the speed of deployment when compared with the weeks it took to deploy IBM as "as a real contrast".

"You could deploy in hours," he said of QlikView.

QlikView also brought Aggregate Industries the added benefit of being "cheaper to run" and allowed its business intelligence specialists to spend less time developing and more time delivering business value.

Gibbons said it was a "no brainer" to base Aggregate's business intelligence strategy on the platform.

"It's the first point of call, if somebody needs a view, they either go to the app and if it still doesn't give them the view, we develop it or produce a new one," he said.

"Now we have a tool that's responsive, easy to use and we can deploy something if there's a tool missing; it's helped change the culture," Gibbons added.

Gibbons isn't the only CIO to have recently vented their frustration with IBM. Coats plc CIO Richard Cammish slammed the likes of SAP and IBM, who he calls "legacy vendors", because of their complicated software licensing models.

"This is an industry issue, where companies like SAP, Oracle, IBM and to a lesser extent Microsoft may find it mildly insulting to be called legacy vendors. But to pick through their licensing model is incredibly complex," he said.

Coats plc dumped IBM, who was its main data centre provider, after growing increasingly frustrated with the vendor.