Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) vs IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson

• Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
• Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
• Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.

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• Pixel perfect reports. If a client can provide a pixel-perfect mockup, I can make the report indistinguishable from the mockup.
• Data security. It doesn't matter who the user is; when they log in and run a report, they will only see the data they are permitted to see.
• Performant reports on large data. Many tools have issues running on tables containing only a few million rows. Cognos can consistently run reports on multi-billion row tables without issue.
• Embedding reports in third-party tools. With Cognos Mashup Services, it is possible to build a report in IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson and call it programmatically. Need straight HTML? No problem. JSON? Atom? All good.

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• Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync.
• Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design.
• Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed.
• Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have.
• Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration.
• Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly.

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• OLAP-cubes MUST IMMEDIATELY be upgraded to 64-bit-technology (if not, we are lost as Cognos/IBM-customer).
• Easier integration of complex authorisation systems (concepts) into cubes (vertical as well as horizontal authorisation).
• Much more statistics-functionality in cubes! (IBM bought SPSS 10 years ago!! where is the benefit of Cognos-users!!)!!!

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• we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
• i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.

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• IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson provides capabilities such as data analysis and reporting that work seamlessly for individuals, departments, and workgroups in all organizations and businesses.
• Customizable and secure data exploration through NLP.
• I can easily connect data analysis with ad-hoc reports.

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