Cognos BI or Salesforce?  Salesforce.com is a great tool, I use it all of the time, but have you ever tried to create a report in Salesforce.com?  I have, and the experience is not a pleasant one.  Once you figure out how to create the report you realize that you are very limited in your report options.  (No cross-filtering, No joined reports, low limits on number of scheduled reports and dashboards, inability to group data)

Salesforce.com believes that they have addressed this issue in their upcoming release of Spring 12.  In Spring 12 they promise that the new Analytics Edition will allow for bucketing/grouping, Cross Filtering, Joined reports, and Higher Limits on Scheduled reports and Dashboards.  They also say be patient we will continue to improve the product and eventually Analytics will catch up to other BI vendors in its capabilities.  All of this at a price of $40 per user per month.  Also, there is no option to purchase this functionality for a few members of your company, if one person needs it the whole company, or at least everyone who uses salesforce, has to have a license.

What do you do in the meantime while you are waiting for Salesforce.com to catch up?  The simple solution is to use IBM Cognos BI 10 for reporting off of your Salesforce.com data.  IBM Congos BI is the best Business Intelligence product on the market and it is a much cheaper option for your sales reports.    IBM Cognos BI is also flexible.  You are not required to purchase licenses that you don’t need.  Only purchase the licenses that you want.

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