Subscriber Analytics, Migrated from Cognos to Power BI

IDS's BI team was engaged after a referral from a data platform vendor, specifically for its documented migration path from Cognos to Power BI.

Client

A regional mobile network operator

Services provided

About the project

Our solution

The Customer: Who they are

A regional mobile network operator whose commercial and network teams relied on a decade-old Cognos BI estate for subscriber and churn reporting.

The Challenge: Identifying the villain

Cognos licensing costs kept rising while user adoption kept falling — most business users had gone back to exporting to Excel because the reports were slow and rigid. “We were paying enterprise BI prices for spreadsheet behavior,” said the Head of Analytics.

The Journey: The search for a solution

An earlier internal attempt to migrate a handful of reports to Power BI stalled because business logic buried in Cognos packages didn’t translate cleanly, and the team lacked a systematic way to validate parity.

The Discovery: Finding IDS

IDS’s BI team was engaged after a referral from a data platform vendor, specifically for its documented migration path from Cognos to Power BI.

The Solution: The hero arrives

IDS ran a structured migration: cataloguing all 200+ existing Cognos reports, rebuilding the semantic layer in Power BI, and validating every report for functional parity before decommissioning the source. Self-service capability was layered on top with governed datasets so business users could build their own views without breaking the underlying model.

The Implementation: The battle

Reports were migrated in priority waves — churn and subscriber reporting first, given their commercial weight — with old and new reports run side by side until business owners signed off on parity. The main obstacle was a set of Cognos calculations with undocumented business rules; IDS worked directly with the commercial team to validate the correct logic before rebuilding.

The Results: The happy ending

  • Reports migrated: 200+ with zero data loss
  • Report load time: minutes → seconds 
  • Active self-service users post-migration: +65% vs. legacy platform
  • BI licensing cost: reduced

“People actually open the reports now instead of asking for the raw export.” — Head of Analytics

Technologies used: Power BI · IBM Cognos (migration source)

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