OpenText Magellan vs. Spotfire Data Science

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

If you have an analytics department, Data Science is perfect for making analyses quicker. Data Science works well for web querying, automating analyses, sharing advanced analyses with others, and performing lots of other advanced analytical processes. Data Science is not a good fit if the analytics you do is stuff that Excel can do. The software is powerful, with lots of features, and unless you actually plan on using those features, it's not worth paying for.

Incentivized

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

• It has a great user interface, easy to navigate and learn on the fly.
• There are lots of great options for data organization and analysis! Makes it a handy tool for presentations as well.
• A collaborative ability is highly valued for my company where we often work from home or on site. Being able to share the data with those in the office so multiple people can look at it is a great tool!

Incentivized

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, some functionality is hidden per upgrade to other versions. Feel data mining functionality would be useful, but not budget for software. At the current price point, would have expected more (such as Mathematica breadth of functionality for one price).
• It is light on optimization capability.
• Slow when considering very large datasets, performing things such as distribution identification

Incentivized

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

The company is hesitant to spend this much on software. They are primarily an engineering firm, and they don't understand the use of analytical software for environmental professionals.

Incentivized

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

I prefer Spotfire Data Science's approach. It is more natural and fits the way I think. I prefer to use Spotfire Data Science's VB for writing macros. It is real code, meaning that I do not need to trick the software to do what I need and there are no implied loops over solving simple problems. The graphs are publication quality and can be edited by hand or using a macro if I am building hundreds of them. Spotfire Data Science had a user-friendly approach to building lengthy data processing streams (in its workspaces). It is just so fast for analyzing a dataset that you have never seen before and efficient for ongoing work on the same data.

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• Our company has had the program for less than 1 year. We don't expected a positive return this year. The goal is for Data Science to led to defined projects by the end of the end of the year and implementation in the following two. Overall, we are planning on 4 years to fully recoup the cost of the software and the cost of implementing identified projects.

Incentivized