IBM Watson Analytics (discontinued)

Despite its shortcomings, IBM Watson Analytics does its job well. It's paired for any size organization, big or small – but realistically, if you're going to be analyzing user-data on a broad scale, it probably makes sense to use this program if you're working with a big company. Otherwise Facebook Analytics could probably do the work for you, for a cheaper price. Our social media manager has been using it to track data for a client of ours, and they have been enjoying it so far. It's a good system to determine user traffic.

For low throughput scenarios, you can get really useful data with little effort, especially when building multiple applications. For high throughput use cases, I would suggest redesigning your product to work around the really high price point of IBM Watson. Under no circumstances would I recommend IBM Bluemix as a hosting provider in contrast to AWS or Azure.

It's well suited to corporate clients who aren't as concerned by the potential fees (as they'd be much higher developing the functionality in house). It's also very handy to have the services delivered by a company that's got the reputation of IBM as it's easier to show that this is trustworthy and will have good uptime...etc.

It is well suited to a number of applications we are pursuing, BUT, with the difficulties we encountered setting up accounts, getting billing information, fraudulent practices, NO attempt to resolve complaints, months to get bills and sort out payments, there is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that I would ever, ever recommend using Bluemix to our customers. By the way, the ONE demo I was able to put together, at GREAT PERSONAL EXPENSE, over $350 (which due to your awful customer service resulting in me NOT being able to be reimbursed by management or the customer) was not only a huge success, but for a couple of weeks the customer asked me to repeat the demo for anyone who visited us. However, I let them know in no uncertain terms, that I could never recommend using Bluemix after my experience, and we would do much better utilizing competing services.

Anything with textual data would be a perfect scenario for this product as the ultimate aim for it was to create an instance which would be able to process textual data just like the way humans might do it.

Watson makes it easy to do analysis. A good scenario to use it would be when trying to analyze a set of data and find insights that normally wouldn't be so easy to find when looking at the original data as a whole. When someone needs to ask a question about how a set of data points relate to each other, Watson is the way to go.