HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. IBM Watson Discovery vs. Sitecore Search

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.

Incentivized

Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• It is an excellently fast platform with documents and the answers to queries.
• With automation learning beneficial as it saves time.
• When searching for a document, everything stays located and easy to find.
• Acceptance of various documents.
• It has a quite comfortable Technical support, always available when required.

Incentivized

• Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
• Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
• Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
• The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
• Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.

Incentivized

• While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
• There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.

Incentivized

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.

Incentivized

Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.

Incentivized

Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).

Incentivized

Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
• A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
• Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?

Incentivized

• Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
• With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
• We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.

Incentivized