Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Quadient Inspire

IBM analytics has continued to improve upon the days of being the original core metrics. After using the updated version for quite some time, it has been great at providing the needed analytics to measure ROI and goal performance for our quarterly KPI's. It has resulted in a great increase in web engagements although we are a midsize company, smaller outfits may not need such an expensive option.

Incentivized

Quadient Inspire is well suited to complex processes and requests. It is very well designed software which includes numerous plug in options for ease of use with other software. They have built in security functions to protect intellectual property and prohibit unauthorized changes. This software is great for people who need control and large feature sets or work with quantities in the millions. Of course, it also works fine on smaller projects. Where it would be overkill is for environments which only need simple variable pieces. Just setting up an address block? If this is your regular job, this software is excessive

Incentivized

• IBM CXA comprises an acquisition called Tealeaf. This tool has deep heritage and this is evident in its present-day capabilities.
• The Universal Behaviour Exchange or UBX puts the concept of personalisation at the forefront. The ability to combine physical (analog) and digital transactions to create the complete picture of a customer journey, is a stand out benefit.
• The solution does not have to involve the purchase of software. IBM CXA can be sold as a service bundled with analytics as a service. This not only lowers the cost of ownership, it gets around one of the principal issues. Strong staff with design and analytical capability to drive the solution and deliver tangible benefits.
• The seamless integration of Watson AI services to help with the heavy lifiting. Watson reinforces the analytical focus this solution has and can learn to recognise situations specific to a company.

Incentivized

• Highly flexible data ingestion
• Clear and powerful workflow design that makes support easy to understand as teams evolve
• Great internal debugging tool that simplifies and accelerates the development cycle
• Powerful scripting structure available at nearly every aspect of data management, composition, and finishing allowing for specialized requirements not available in the standard toolset to be met

Incentivized

• The user interface is in Flash, which can be very frustrating and slow at times. Apparently, this is to be transitioned in a future release.
• Can only segment the last 93 days of data. Any historical segmentation beyond the 93 days must be run in Explore (which is credit based, and has its own limitations with the number of credits per month, based on the initial contract with IBM).
• Reports can only display 93 days of data at a given time for custom date ranges. There are pre-programmed date ranges setup with IBM during implementation (last week, last month, last quarter etc.), but are not flexible enough to answer more specific questions.
• Certain reports cannot have segments applied, making answering some simple questions a bit more tricky. For example, I can create a segment around mobile devices and apply it to the marketing channels report, but I can't create a marketing channel segment and apply it to the mobile reports.
• Built in API calls allows for nice report design and automation.

• Within CJM: Not easy to share maps with a large group of people, still needs to be done on an individual basis which is time-consuming.
• Not able to unload all file types into maps. It would be great to have video.
• There are a lot of third-party suppliers that make up the full services in Inspire. This limits the development that Quadient can do to.

IBM Digital Analytics is a great solution for our clients and I believe they offer the best solution for the retail space. We have access to IBM support via email or live chat and they can answer many of the reporting questions that come up. IBM is receptive to our feedback of the product so I am confident they will continue making improvements

We are using Quadient Inspire products since last 5 years. And we are able to achieve everything with respect to the customer's needs and desired output. Quadient is adding new very important features every day that make document structure very easy for developers and end users. We would like to stick with Quadient for a long time.

Very easy to implement and use.

There are parts of the product that are extremely easy to use, but it can be hard to build it up to get to that point. I'm a power user and I know I've only barely scratched the surface, but the transactional users barely have to lift a finger to get their letters out. There's a lot more that can be done if I had the time and resources to devote to improving our letters more and there are times when the interface is in my way as to meeting those goals, but by and large, it's a swift and easy to use program.

Never had any issues

I am giving this rating because Quadient products are highly available. Most of the time all Quadient products are available. In some cases Quadient always follows the planned schedule and maintenance. They always inform all the partners and clients a day or two in advance so that the clients can work accordingly.

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

I want you to rate the performance of the Quadient Inspire 9 out of 10. Because every time we work with Quadient products I never feel any sluggishness and any performance issue. Along with this, one thing that we all should understand is that the performance of any application also depends on the computer hardware. So along with the software application, your hardware should also meet the minimum requirements.

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

Overall Quadient team is very responsive and willing to come to the table and provide valuable information and resolution for problems. What tier of support you have would defiantly impact the experience you have. Had some challenges with a few members of the support team , but when brought up with the vendor it was quickly resolved

Incentivized

I had a couple of weeks of training back in 2005 on the Quadient premises in Hradec Kralowe. The instructor was just great! Besides showing as normal functionalities, he went so far to solve our concrete challenges. He actually encouraged me to become a "real" programmer. I have written my first lines of code in Inspire (GMC PrintNetT) and never looked back.

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

Quadient offers online training for all of its products (paid service). You can choose your pace and go through the material and then solve real challenges. At the end, you can choose to take a final assignment and get certification which is a really good thing to do. If you get stuck, the training team will answer any of your questions and give you guidance.

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

As you consider your digital transformation, think of the people who may object. They have valid criticisms, valuable insights and information critical to your success. Quadient’s advice is to build a strong internal team and confront these questions early. When everyone understands the project from their perspective, the project has a better chance of success.

Much of the work we did in IBM Digital Analytics could have been answered through Google Analytics, a much simpler, agile and FREE solution set. Not mention, given the vast number of Google Analytics USERS, free and actionable support is simply a click away ... this compared to IBM Digital Analytics fractured and often absent support service.

The above drop down would not allow me to pick the similar products that I have used previously. Planet Pres : Good in its time. Now very slow compared with Quadient. Compart: As quick... If not slightly quicker than Quadient. This does not counteract how difficult this software is to use. It has no GUI interface and even advanced programmers struggle to use it. Both of these products are inferior to Quadient when it comes to implementing within a normal organisation.

Not really. It's not cheap, but it's a great value for what you get. This is enterprise-level software and the cost reflects that. The pay-per-page aspect makes sense too. We get a lot of sheets included in our contract and we use them all. It's a good contract with pricing that makes sense.

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

I am giving this rating because Quadient products are very reliable. Quadient products can be deployed across multiple departments and sites as needed. We can integrate Quadient products with other applications and tools in a very effective, efficient and flexible way. We can deploy Quadient products in Cloud as well.

The PSO team is very involved and knowledgeable. Some times there are availability issues due to the number of companies they are supporting but they do their best to deliver on time. PSO cost aren't cheap, but they deliver a big bang for the buck especially on critical projects or involving them in strategic approaches/decisions.

Incentivized

• We spend too much time trying to work around bugs on the new UI.
• We spend too much time trying to figure out how to make certain segments work because support and the knowledge center are lackluster.
• Our sales rep is very unresponsive and leaves us searching for a lot of answers on our own, including what other products we may benefit from that IBM offers.

Incentivized

• Since purchasing Inspire we have won many business opportunities as it enables us to create documents we couldn't do before, for example: Council Tax Bills.
• It is a lot faster at processing than our previous software. We had one job we had to extract addresses from, it was 56,000 records from a 5.5million line text file. Our previous software took 26 hours to pull out the addresses, Quadient Inspire took 43 seconds!
• We are able to automate processes through Inspire via CLI batch files, where a job would normally take 30 minutes to set up and process, a bit of time spent on the workflow and automation script means we can just double click a batch file for repeat jobs and the print file is created in seconds.

Incentivized