IBM Watson Explorer vs. IBM Watson Studio on Cloud Pak for Data

The Watson Explorer is great because it potentially replaces a meriad of other low-level analytics products that we would need to use for data analytics and data mining. WEX isn't really suitable much beyond doing text and data analytics and performing machine learning, so if your team doesn't really have a use-case that fits all of these categories, it is worth looking at an alternative.

Incentivized

It has a lot of features that are good for teams working on large-scale projects and continuously developing and reiterating their data project models. Really helpful when dealing with large data. It is a kind of one-stop solution for all data science tasks like visualization, cleaning, analyzing data, and developing models but small teams might find a lot of features unuseful.

Incentivized

• Free to try - It's possible to use most of the useful features of Watson Explore on their trial/demo accounts.
• Super well-designed data analytics tool - Most of the tools and features of the explorer are really useful, and truly help you fully understand the depth of any format of textual data.
• Extensive sources compatibility - WEX can retrieve data from a large range of sources, and the compatibility there is quite good as well.

Incentivized

• Integration of IBM Watson APIs such as speech to text, image recognition, personality insights, etc.
• SPSS modeler and neural network model provide no-code environments for data scientists to build pipelines quickly.
• Enforced best-practices set up POCs for deployment in production with a minimum of re-work.
• Estimator validation lets data scientists test and prove different models.

Incentivized

• Support is just OK, like most of the other IBM Watson products. The setup/integration is really hands-on, but it's also problematic because support later may take a considerable amount of time.
• UI could still use a little more improvement - part of the administration and sources dashboards are hard to navigate.
• The Application Builder is a great part of the product, but hard to learn/understand - this is where we needed the most support from IBM and tutorials/documentation.

Incentivized

• The cost is steep and so only companies with resources can afford it
• It will be nice to have Chinese versions so that Chinese engineers can also use it easily
• It takes a while to learn how to input different kinds of skin defects for detection

Incentivized

because we find out that DSX results have improved our approach to the whole subject (data, models, procedures)

Incentivized

The UI flawlessly merges this offering by providing a neat, minimal, responsive interface

Incentivized

From time to time there are services unavailable, but we have been always informed before and they got back to work sooner than expected

Incentivized

Never had slow response even on our very busy network

Incentivized

I received answers mostly at once and got answered even further my question: they gave me interesting points of view and suggestion for deepening in the learning path

Incentivized

The trainers on the job are very smart with solutions and very able in teaching

Incentivized

The Platform is very handy and suggests further steps according my previous interests

Incentivized

It surprised us with unpredictable case of use and brand new points of view

Incentivized

Google Cloud offers a Natural Language product, but it is just an API. This API doesn't offer the useful visualizations of relations, analytics, and graphs that IBM Watson Explorer offers on their interface. For this reason, we chose to go with IBM WEX. For later stages of our production, we decided to use Google's NLP API because we found that it was quick to integrate into production after studying data and developing models using IBM WEX.

Incentivized

The main reason I personally changed over from Azure ML Studio is because it lacked any support for significant custom modelling with packages and services such as TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and Spark ML. IBM Watson Studio provides these services and does so in a well integrated and easy to use fashion making it a preferable service over the other services that I have personally used.

Incentivized

It helped us in getting from 0 to DSX without getting lost

Incentivized

• Positive - Trial/demo period. This was really useful for us to figure out what features of WEX we liked most and how difficult it would be to integrate WEX into our workflow.
• Negative - On-boarding was long and almost always requires support from IBM support, unlike most other products this advanced.
• Positive - WEX replaced a large selection of alternative products we would have to use for the same functionality, and having all of that function in one place was definitely helpful.

Incentivized

• Could instantly show data driven insights to drive 20% incremental revenue over existing results
• Still don't have a real use case for unstructured data like twitter feed
• Some of the insights around user actions have driven new projects to automate mundane tasks

Incentivized