Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. RapidMiner

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

RapidMiner is really fantastic to perform fast ETL processes and work on your data as you want, no matter what is the source. You will really save a lot of time when you learn how to use it. You can create mining analysis with several algorithms, and thanks to add-ons, you can apply a lot of techniques. It will not replace a business intelligence dashboard but it allows to create great datamarts for your BI tools. One negative thing is that It's no easy to share your outputs.

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

• I am very impressed at how easily you can work within RapidMiner without much data analytics training. Plus with the help of the crowd, you can see what steps others have taken with their data analytics projects.
• Text mining was simple and clean. We used this for our call transcription problem where we didn't have the resources to listen to each call. We needed to qualify each call based on some key phrases.
• Our direct mail program was large and not very targeted. Using RapidMiner, we were able to isolate a predictive level we felt comfortable with and decided not to send to anyone below that level. We saved quite a bit of money.

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.

• I hope RapidMiner would be the first data science platform that allows data scientists to change the behaviour of a machine learning algorithm that already exists in the repository. For example, I want to be able to change the way a genetic algorithm mutates.
• Automatic programming: One day, I hope RapidMiner can automatically generate codes in any 4th generation programming language based on the developed model.
• More tutorials/samples needed: Why doesn't RapidMiner becomes the next 'UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository'? Provide real examples and real cases for users to study and understand the best practices in modelling. RapidMiner already has some datasets for a tutorial. Besides the existing samples, I hope RapidMiner can provide more sample data and examples.

Incentivized

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

Very fast and user-friendly tool

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

Very use to use and learn

Incentivized

Never had any issues

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We tried different data tools and we figured we give RapidMinder Studio a shot as one of our employees had experience with it, and when compared to some of the other tools that we used it was the best fit among the test group that we used. Overall it was a little more fluid and user-friendly.

Incentivized

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.

• 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

• Thanks to the patters that RapidMiner has detected, we have been able to follow clues in the right direction, both for the Protein Interaction Network Analysis and for the Epilepsy Research
• Students and participants of the machine learning workshops have learned about this technology and about the tool

Incentivized