I must be the last one to notice, but you can actually try out Cognos 10.1 BI and Cognos Express for free (time limited trial). That’s very convenient and is totally a major shift from usual ‘we have products soooo good that you have to ask partners to show them’ policy.
‘Open download and use but paid support’ policy advocated by Oracle (for example) can actually attract more people to work with the products and to buy them eventually, even when they are already at a different company. It really worked well on russian DBMS market, where Oracle is the only ‘big enterprise’ choice.
On the other hand, both BI and Express are quite complex products, so mere effort of trying to make them work in non-obvious tasks can lead to utmost frustration. But both of them are packed with demos and samples, so that should make life a bit easier.
All in all, I’m really glad this is happening and am rooting for time-unlimited trials. You won’t build a serious system without fix packs anyway )