Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security vs. Ideagen Risk Management vs. Symbiant

For any news editor, Dataminr is a must. It is the only platform I have used which I would 100 percent recommend to anyone who needs constant access and notification to all that is going on in the world's media. Various other platforms provide information, but Dataminr collates all these other platforms together into one easy to use interface. It is remarkably quick to check Dataminr after receiving a desktop or email notification and find out what is going on regarding a specific subject. As a news editor, I am required to manage a news team that produces copy for breaking stories, and Dataminr allows me to find news and commission it faster than any other platform I have previously used.

Incentivized

Pentana is great for monitoring PIs and risks. We find it less helpful for monitoring projects (with the Actions module); it isn't quite flexible enough for our needs, though the support team have been very helpful in adding custom fields for us.

• Collating various sources into one interface makes keeping track of breaking news remarkably easy.
• The live update feature means updates from breaking stories are fed directly to the consumer. This means users do not have to go out their way to find out every last detail of a story, and can instead use their time writing the story.

Incentivized

• Pentana is excellent for monitoring, recording and reporting on PIs. Very easy to use the PI module.
• Pentana is excellent for monitoring risks at various levels (service, strategic etc.). Risks are displayed very clearly in a tree structure and the module is relatively easy to use.

• Setting up Dataminr can be relatively obtuse. Although basic functions are easy to use, the more in-depth aspects require research and training to use correctly.
• Topics are very broad, which can be a negative at times. It would be useful to have 'football' as a topic rather than 'sport', for instance.

Incentivized

• Pentana could improve the free Documents module that comes with Pentana Risk. At the moment documents have to be linked to an action in order to display query results (such as how many documents are due for review) - this can be confusing for users who don't understand why there is an action linked. There is also no easy way for users to see the documents that are assigned to them.
• We would like to use the Actions module fully in order to monitor our corporate projects, but it a bit confusing for users and not very flexible when a project doesn't mirror Pentana's way of monitoring actions.

Some modules are more user-friendly than others. It's sometimes not obvious where to click to update the fields (or even that field titles can be clicked on). We have written 'Howdys' to help users. There can also seem to be a lot of steps/clicks to updating risks and actions. The Reports module on Pentana classic is certainly not user-friendly, particularly the Report Layout and Charts modules - we were told these would be integrated into the web version but this hasn't happened yet.

Connection issues/downtime occur but they are rare and generally quickly fixed. There are frequent seminars and tutorials to teach the platform. This is an excellent decision from the company and has made me more willing to learn how to use Dataminr correctly. As a result of this, I use the platform more than I would have if I had been forced to learn everything myself.

Incentivized

The support team are excellent and always answer queries promptly. They are very helpful.

Before using Dataminr we did not use a similar platform, with stories discovered by simply crawling the web (TweetDeck/Reddit/news sites, etc). Because of this, Dataminr has been a game-changer for us and has revolutionized the way we have worked since it was introduced. Being able to completely remove one aspect of the job (searching for news) has increased productivity in all other areas.

Incentivized

We selected Pentana because our neighbouring authorities are users and had spoken highly of the product and given us demonstrations; some of our staff were also familiar with Pentana when it was called Covalent. It seemed to be the best product on the market for monitoring risks, PIs and projects.

• Since starting to use Dataminr, our traffic has vastly increased. Though not entirely to thank for the growth, Dataminr has played a role in talkSPORT.com's ComScore increasing by 150 percent over the past 18 months.
• Increased traffic is partly due to producing more content, and Dataminr has directly led to discovering a number of stories we previously would have missed.

Incentivized

• Pentana Risk has allowed my team to focus on other areas of work whereas before we would be manually chasing for updates on PIs and risk. Pentana Risk does the chasing for us!
• We are able to produce reports for audit purposes very easily, rather than sending spreadsheets which is what we used to do.
• New managers can easily inherit risks, projects and PIs and see all of this on a custom portal, saving them time when they start.