SAP Data Intelligence vs. SolarWinds Task Factory

If you have an SAP products ecosystem in your IT landscape, it becomes a no-brainer to go ahead with an SAP Data Intelligence product for your data orchestration, data management, and advanced data analytics needs, such as data preparation for your AI/ML processes. It provides a seamless integration with other SAP products.

Incentivized

Since I started working with this great tool all data analysis programs have been running effectively. Implementation of projects and tasks have been effective and reliable. Data collected from each department gives us working plan on better management of various programs. The Dimension Merge SCD Transform helps us to load large volumes of data within a short period of time.

Incentivized

• It integrates well with our current ecosystem of SAP products, like HANA.
• It provides end-to-end machine learning operations, with tools for the complete model life cycle.
• It has a simple user interface for novice users, with complex tools also available for power users.
• It builds on SAP Data Hub, providing all the ETL functions of that tool with additional machine learning functionality.
• It can run in the cloud, no on-premise software management needed.
• Many programming languages are supported, it provides a sandbox environment for the user to develop in whichever style they prefer.
• SAP is very actively developing and improving it.

Incentivized

• The single most beneficial component to Task Factory is the Upsert component. If you're familiar with writing MERGE statements in T-SQL, you'll appreciate the Upsert component. Drag the component into your Data Flow and a few clicks later you have a MERGE without the code complexities.
• Where some native SSIS components leave you wanting more, Task Factory extends on many of these components as well as support for data sources not native to SSIS components.
• The number of extra components that come in the Task Factory tool kit will expand your tool belt to do just about anything you need or want to accomplish in SSIS.

Incentivized

• Data transfer speed tends to be slow when there is poor internet connection since SAP Data Intelligence don’t synchronize data while offline. However, this is not vendor fault, that’s why we have implemented robust wireless technology internet connection in our organization.

Incentivized

• It was built by Pragmatic Works who sold it to SentryOne and now Solar Winds, concerned about future support. SolarWinds is discontinuing support for related products such as BiXpress.
• Had issues with connecting to certain versions of SQL Server - would fail when deploying one package - had to deploy the entire solutions.
• Occasional random failures observed with the Filter tranform.

Incentivized

Allow collaborations among various personas
with insights as ratings and comments on the
datasets Reuse knowledges on the datasets for new users Next-Gen Data Management and Artificial Intelligence

Incentivized

Task Factory has become a key product for our use of doing ETL work in SSIS. Their custom SSIS components allow us to work simply on the data engineering side of things. We can ignore the lower level work needed to connect to disparate data sources. This allows us to work faster and provide more value to the business

Incentivized

I think the troubleshooting process might be streamlined with improved error recording and tracing. A lot of information about issues and how to fix them is hidden away in the Kubernetes pods themselves. I'm not sure whether SAP Data Intelligence can fix this problem it may be connected to Kubernetes's design, in which case fixing it could need modifications inside Kubernetes itself.

Incentivized

Compared to some of the other transformations I have worked with, it really is pretty simple for the type of functionality you get

Incentivized

Initially we struggle to get help from SAP but then dedicated Dev angel was assigned to us and that simplify the overall support scenario. There is still room of improvement in documentation around SAP Data intelligence. We struggle a lot to initially understand the feature and required help around performance improvement area,

Incentivized

Overall, the best vendor we currently have on the data side of the house. No issues, issues are resolved very quickly and upgrades go without any issues.

Incentivized

Overall it went smoothly. Had a couple of gotchas with licensing and upgrading but nothing that really stopped us.

Incentivized

One of the reasons to pick SAP Data Intelligence is the speed and security it provides, in addition to the excellent support it provides. It is also compatible with all popular databases, which is another reason to choose it.

Incentivized

ZappySys is an alternative provider that we tested. However, we found the ease of use, set up and installation to be much simplier and quicker using Task Factory. ZappySys has a number of the same connectors but are more difficult to setup and the GUI is not as intuitive and simple to use.

Incentivized

• Automation of data management slashed tasks by over 60% in most departments for the first 8 months.
• Metadata catalogs have enabled us to categorize data from disjointed sources in one place.
• It runs multiple ML models which enhances flexibility when managing data.

Incentivized

• We were able to support our developers with Task Factory features and reduce the development time by 40%.
• Recently Task Factory has changed their pricing module and it seems to be pretty costly for our process. Our business team has started to evaluate whether this is worth it going forward.

Incentivized