Azure Analysis Services vs. Endeca (discontinued)

Microsoft Azure Analysis Services is best tool which is well suited for many type of scenarios. Like if the organization is dealing with a lot of critical data and need some better analysis and insights for that data then tool serves the best. It helps in depth analysis and getting the desired result which helps in making big decision for any organization. We can create role based access for sensitive data hence it is very helpful for security point of view. Helps in making the business more productive and taking decision based on facts. It is less appropriate for scenarios like where data amount is less and the solution is very costly and someone can get a cheaper solution. Also not suited for environment where user directory do not exist because without the help of user directory role could not be created hence proper utilization of this tool will not be possible.

Incentivized

Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.

• You can import data from various sources (i.e. Oracle, Azure SQL...)
• You can store data models
• You can elaborate data and create insights
• Perfect integration with Excel and Power BI

Incentivized

• Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
• Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
• It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.

• Microsoft Azure Analysis Services is very costly solution and in that price we can get some better business intelligence tool with lot more of capabilities
• The dashboard or we can say user interface is complex and need time to understand and gain expertise in order for proper working.
• It needs continuation monitoring which is sometime a big task.
• Sometime, the tool shows unusual behavior and become unstable, so we need to clear temp files for proper functioning.

Incentivized

• For the most part, it is quite intuitive, however, you need to have an intermediate knowledge of HTML to be able to construct unique promotional web pages. Nowadays, with WordPress and other content management systems that have WYSIWYG interfaces, Endeca may prove to be challenging to HTML beginners.

If the solution is implemented well and the business understands the purpose of the Endeca stack, it offers a great way for a business to explore and benefit from its existing data. From my experience, the Endeca solution has exposed data patterns to a business that were not thought about or explored before because of the lack of available tools to properly expose these patterns

The system itself is very usable, and with proper training is very sensible in its organization and method of operation. There are some downsides in initial setup in the way things are imported (or not in some cases) in setting up properties and dimensions. Overall however it's amazingly flexible in terms of the content it can index and make available for search.

Support has been very good, and the trainers for the various Endeca courses have all been very willing to help long after the classes have been completed, so in the instances where we're waiting on support from Oracle, it's often that the members of their training arm can help us out as well.

The training is actually really good, and absolutely necessary - although this is software that has great documentation, the documentation itself is so vast, that it would be difficult to learn haphazardly, not to mention being incredibly time consuming to do so. Online training probably would have been fine except for the fact that having someone look over your shoulder to see where you're going wrong is helpful. This also allowed our team to sit in a single room and converse about functionality, etc. that would have been difficult to facilitate via an online class.

We did some online Q&A with the Oracle team, but I would definitely recommend doing an in person class if you have a large team that will be attending - there's definitely no replacements for a large class of technically oriented staff members who can drive conversation about specific topics that might surface.

There were some features we were hoping to get implemented in this particular release of Endeca, but were unable to facilitate those requirements due mostly to timeline. Having seen several other implementations, we will definitely have future iterations to add functionality and improve upon our implementation of Endeca. For the time being, we are satisfied with our implementation as it turned out.

We have used the IBM cloud which was truly a specific nightmare for our team. User experience, layout, and design is big for us as it understandably is with many people. Even if any type of program can technically do all that we need it to, we still found our team will not be as motivated or satisfied using it compared to something more visually appealing and smooth.

Incentivized

Endeca is brilliant for setting up simple and straightforward search platforms that utilise only basic search rules. On the other hand, Apache Solr supports far more complex search platform implementations, including multi-index search. Overall, I would say Solr is far more powerful than Endeca.

Incentivized

• Website analytics; We have realized so many benefits like traffic analysis, CRM, click-through funnels, and many more.
• Aas allows us to do complex calculations and aggregations at slight efforts. It accommodates DAX expression, which in return is simple to apply.

Incentivized

• It is a searching tool, and hard to estimate its impact on conversion.
• It does its job regarding better searching; In terms of efficiency, it's hard to say: it has big learning curve. It requires a dedicated Endeca developer to work on it.
• Compared to Solr, it is way too complicated.