Roambi was a cloud-based solution designed specifically for mobile data consumers, used to create touch-based data visualizations. It was acquired by SAP in 2016 for the SAP Analytics portfolio, and has since been discontinued as a standalone product.
It is well suited for projects that are more discovery related. If this is a one-time project that we create a visual for, this would definitely make sense to use. If this is an ongoing analysis (monthly for example), we might look to another software that we would be able to automate a little further in how the visualization comes together
Getting Roambi up to speed in your company certainly is a quick win. After just a few days, several of our reports were mobilized, interactive and automatically updated. Building Roambi reports is not hard to do; the intuitive interface allows virtually any type of user to create his or her own reports.
In comparison to other tools such as GraphWiz or Circos, Gephi comes with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that makes it easy to load your data, and quickly start building all sorts of different graphs. There's absolutely no code that needs to be written for either loading or modeling. And without downloading additional plug-ins, Gephi ships with quite a few standard graph models, as well as some "fun" extras such as the Sierpinski triangle, and a variety of force atlas types.
Most of the layout types (maybe all) are highly configurable, which can make for extremely customized and unique displays of your data. Again, none of this requires the user to write any code. That said, it is possible to script custom functionality for your models, or even update the Java source code yourself, if you feel like getting technical. Gephi builds are available on GitHub, and the developers encourage people to contribute ideas, improvements, and plug-ins.
There's a plug-in for Gephi that allows for streaming data to update your model. This essentially allows you to create near realtime graphs of your data in motion. This plug-in was by far the biggest reaston we invested time in the product; to create animated data visualizations without exhaustive hours in development.
Report templates that are easy to learn, use, update and maintain.
Great looking reports that stay up-to-date with what Apple is producing. When Apple rolled out the new look and feel to their iOS7 release, Roambi created a brand new set of reports within two weeks to go along with the iOS7 changes.
Seamless integration with our existing BI environment, SAP Business Objects XI, 3.1. This drastically reduced the time from purchase to client-ready roll out from months to weeks.
I (and many others) have had to expand Gephi's memory manually by experimenting with the configuration file. I'm glad it's possible, but it should be easier.
Gephi sometimes crashes inexplicably and loses your work, so I have developed a habit of explicitly exporting versions of my graphs as csv's, but I think this should be handled automatically in Gephi.
Because it is prone to crash, ideally, Gephi would help the user manage his/her use, by estimating processing and memory for very large tasks and prompting the user to confirm their requests before executing. Instead, I just tend to avoid certain functions.
While Gephi isn't perfect, it's a powerful tool for mathematical graph modelling that's hard to find in other products, particularly by way of its interface. It grants non-software developers access to a point-and-click way of creating accurate, beautiful visualizations that would normally take hours in other applications. The fact that it allows for live streaming data is also something that's hard to come by, at least for visualization software
I would definitely use Roambi again because of its ease-of-use, but its lack of customization ability makes it difficult to recommend to businesses as business needs are always changing. People are picky, and on the Roambi project, we were not able to fully live up to the customer's expectations, limited by Roambi's preset limitations.
Gephi is very intuitive and the fact that it shows its process helps the user understand what's going on. However, the animation features can really slow it down and there isn't a way to shut them off. Furthermore, the failures on saving mean you frequently have to start over. These problems disrupt the workflow and can be frustrating.
The interactivity in Gephi and the quality of the output figures are impressive. However, the selling point was the fact that we were able to link Gephi into our pipeline using Java's interface. Other products were less customizable and lacking of the sophistication Gephi provided without too much pain during the liking process.
We have compared Roambi against Business Objects, Reporting Services (on tablet) and Cubeware Cockpit. All those solutions lack in support of touch capabilities and responsiveness. Roambi "feels" just right. There is no training required and users love to explore the application. Compared to Roambi all other solutions feel very technical and hard to understand.
I have only used the product for education purposes. I will not be the best person to provide details about ROI and business efficiency and customer service. I was personally very excited about the tool and am continuing my work on the tool.
Increased insights on customer success metrics (using a Layers report).
Higher motivation of employees, better communication towards employees, tighter bonds with the company - because of Roambi Flow. Periodic Flow magazines with analytic capabilities are sent out to the employees, as we value frequent and meaningful contact - both ways.
