Ayasdi Core is a business intelligence software offering from Ayasdi.
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OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting
Score 7.3 out of 10
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The OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting (formerly OpenText Information Hub (iHub)) component of OpenText™ Magellan™ Analytics Suite is a scalable analytics and data visualization platform that enables IT leaders and their teams to design, deploy, and manage secure, interactive web applications, reports, and dashboards fed by multiple data sources. Magellan BI & Reporting supports high volumes of users, and its integration APIs enable embedded analytic content in any app, displayed on any…
Well suited: 1. If data set is not yet well organized. 2. Hypothesis is not yet established. 3. Need to visually explore to find patterns of data (often when analysts have no good understanding of data) 4. When [you need] to analyze events with a timeframe (specifically a sequence of events as a transaction) Less appropriate 1. If a data set is very large, such as Hadoop data, it becomes hard to manage data pipeline and process to feed the data into Ayasdi. To be feed into Ayasdi, data should be aggregated or organized to some level.
iHub is a decent enough environment that it serves our needs. We can have unlimited users and it can tie into AD although we do not use that feature currently. It is a decent place to store all of the reports in one location, even though for us it is not visually appealing to the end users. iHub is not a place where you want to create robust/interactive dashboards for end users to drill through and follow a "story".
Ayasdi Core provides an easy way to get some insight on data. Typically analytics may require having a model or hypothesis before starting to look into the data, but Ayasdi lets you just feed the data first then start seeing what the data looks like.
Ayasdi Core's topological network visualization is quite unique. It allows you to explore patterns and potential relations between multiple data elements. A user can also dynamically navigate data with different aspects on the web.
The Web version of Ayasdi is easy to use, stable, and fast. It hasn't crashed even when we feed it a lot of data sets, although it took time.
Use of Python SDK is required to feed data into Ayasdi, but it lacks training materials or sample codes for a novice to get started.
Although Web UI of Ayasdi is looking good, often it freezes when the user runs an analysis. It doesn't crash but the web page needs to be refreshed to see the progress of analysis.
Algorithms provided by Ayasdi, such as metrics types, lens types need to be explained (what they are and what their strengths and weaknesses are). We had to Google or do research on our own to understand what they are.
Setting up a "dashboard" is extremely lacking in functionality. The different chart widgets you place on the page do not interact with each other. When you select an item from one do not expect it to highlight or filter another.
The speed and stability are not great, but maybe that is just our environment not being up to snuff...even though we are above the "recommended" settings.
The main GUI for a user is TERRIBLE. You log into a File Tree format where you have to navigate folders to reach the correct dashboard. There are ways around this, but it would either require an expensive payment to the Professional Services team to revamp to UI or another option they gave us was to create the "Default Dashboard" and provide that link to users and in that Dashboard, you use a new tab to include the navigation back to the main screen so that at least on the initial load the user is taken to a friendly looking dashboard instead of a file tree.
We had a working group that has been using R studio for the general purpose of statistical analysis in our organization. Although it is a great tool that provides enriched function sets, it is time-consuming for our clinical analysts to learn the tool to see the first result. R is somewhat of a developer-oriented/friendly tool. Ayasdi is friendly to a domain analyst or end users. Plus, support and consulting from Ayasdi were excellent so that we could get knowledge from them immediately whenever we needed.
Our instance of iHub does not stack up against the other larger BI tools out today. It is a good place to store reports in a central location that allows users to run very specific reports on demand, but it is not a place I would want to store all of my "dashboards". As far as holding individual reports that are specific to an individual need, it is a great tool. If you want to create a report that will be used as a Template for a Form or a Label, iHub is a good choice to store and schedule the report or call it via API to generate it and return it to your calling app.
