IBM Watson Analytics (discontinued)

Implementation of the data is fairly easy, all it requires is registration and uploading data from a spreadsheet – it's little more than copy/pasting which is pretty manageable on time

It's affordable – it offers a $30 plan for its "Plus" services, and $80/month for its Professional services. With a small markup, this is profitable for both us and our clients

Their customer support has been great – they have live personal available by phone or chat during regular business hours, and their Customer Support forums are always available 24/7. They're always quick to address an issue.

The accuracy of the reporting from the program relies solely on the data the user sources. There can be errors in reporting due to...well, human error, which can kind of mess up your entire data sheet

When you're working with a program that is a cloud-based service, decentralized reporting can mislead organizations when you're not properly balanced with the traditional checks of a governed system – again, this is a human-error issue

IBM advertises this as a program that can work for any user, but unless you have experience working with data analytics, it can be difficult to determine where to start. I had to look up a few tutorials online before I was able to properly get my data rolling through

IBM Bluemix provides a wealth of powerful APIs. The ones I tried were easy to use and required minimal training to get up to speed.

I'd rate the documentation 9/10 as it was easy to navigate, had good examples and explained most of the possible inputs/outputs.

The IBM Bluemix interface itself was horrendous. Performance is a feature, especially for a platform as pricey as Bluemix. Please cure the sluggishness so it's actually useable.

Billing details could be improved so it's easier to figure out how much I'm paying and why.

Worst customer support I've ever seen. With multiple tickets, I never heard a response. Despite being a paying customer!

Easy modular access to new functionality like text to speech.

Integrates well with NodeRED.

Documentation is really hard to search through and follow along with. Needs a lot more examples and guidance.

Pricing isn't clear a lot of the time. As a developer trying new stuff, I've been hit with charges and been unsure where the usage came from. Would be good for this to be easier to follow up. Had asked support staff and got no reply.

The interface can be overwhleming.

Visual recognition. We put together a number of very effective demonstrations, over a short period (7-10 days) to show our management team as well as customers how it would be done, how the Bluemix applications could be integrated with other services (eg. Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft's OneDrive) to create one very capable, automated, integrated application that could solve one of our customer's knotty problems.

The visual recognition application was the only thing we tried during this 7-10 days period. Significant issues with technical and account support (there was absolutely none in any time of what would be considered a 'timely' manner, led us to realize that it was not a service we could use for production, and we therefore did not continue to try out other services.

Although we didn't get to the point of using several services, the services for storage and visual recognition, as well as those for integrating with other cloud provider services (e.g., AWS) were smooth and effortless.

ALMOST EVERYTHING. Account support was virtually non-existent. We had set up a trial account on the basis of how many training images we could use (they advertised that it was something like 100 per day--but it turned out that the actual number was for the entire trial period. Thus, we almost immediately ran into our limit and could not proceed. We set up a second trial account, but couldn't get that one to work at all (with no meaningful error messages to why it wasn't working). Finally in desperation, we set up a third account tied to a personal credit card. (It was the weekend and we had to have a demonstration ready for Monday afternoon.) That third account, although setup, also would not work. (Some of the problems could have been the result of not having three separate, easily available emails, phone numbers, and billing addresses to use in setting up the accounts, which certainly exacerbated the issues.) On Monday morning we were finally able to reach someone that helped get the 'billed' account turned up--but even they admitted they could not figure out why it had not worked on Sunday.

Over the period of about three days we made multiple attempts to reach both technical and account support. Generally the wait was something close to 24 hours, far, far beyond what we would be able to use in a production environment.

Technical support was generally quite a bit more helpful that the account support team. The technical folks were able to get 'stuck' and non-working account working again, but the account support team was completely unable to provide any billing information. This included how much had been billed to the 'personal' credit card (the one we had to use because it was setup during the weekend when our own internal finance folks couldn't provide a company credit card), and they were completely unable to provide an actual statement, either then or for months later.

One thing of particular note--the 'on-line help' feature for account services was extremely disappointing. There was absolutely no way to get any kind of billing or accounting information using the on-line services. You would think that you could, but you simply can not!

We were finally able to get an accounting almost 6 months later and ONLY because it had gone to some form of 'collection' department within IBM and they were trying to get the final $24 paid. (The biggest part of the amount due from the demonstration period, which was about 7-10 days and had amounted to about $350 in charges, at least 10 times what we had expected) had been automatically charged to the 'personal' credit card we used in desperation to get an account set up so we could get a very important demonstration for our out-of-town customers who were expecting a demonstration the following Monday afternoon. However, the billing fell across two accounting months, with only about $24 in the second month, but during that account, the bank had changed their association with MasterCard to Visa and had issued new cards and rejected any automatic billing to the old card. This left a balance of $24 to be paid, which we had no clue of. We noticed that we had only received the one bill, but not the second, but again, calls to IBM were either not returned or the people we reached told us they could not find out how much was still owed or how we could pay the balance by phone. Finally, almost 6 months after our demo, we received an email from their 'collections' department. We told them that we were not going to provide every 1 cent of funds UNTIL they provided us with an accounting of the services used, etc. That took a few days and we were finally able to get the $24 resolved.

We explained most of this to at least five different technical/account support people along the way. At NO time, did ANY IBM representative ever offer ANY kind of 'consideration' for the trouble we had had, even after learning that the company was unable to reimburse us for 'personal' expenses BECAUSE we could not receive a standard billing statement.

It can definitely parse textual data really well.

It has some great features associated with it for analyzing the textual data.

You don't have to know real world coding to use it.

I think they could add some more things into the user manuals.

Make it compatible with HTML formats as well as it is with the doc format.

Let the users have access to the instance which is as close to the jeopardy instance as possible.

Great for visualizing data in an appealing way.

Makes analytics and the process of "asking questions" very easy for people.

Learning how to work the product is easy as well.

Ability to link to a variety of data sources.

Shortcuts are great, but sometimes provide a roadblock when trying to dive deeper into the data.

Customizing the look of charts would be great.