1. Home
  2. Data Science Platforms
  3. IBM Watson Studio Reviews
  4. User Review of IBM Watson Studio
Great resource for learning
April 16, 2018

Great resource for learning

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience)

We primarily use it for internal training and upskilling in IBM products/services and Data Science skills. This experience in turn helps us to better market Watson Studio, and our related services, to our customers and prospects. Finally we also help customers implement, administer/manage, and build solutions using Watson Studio and related components e.g. Jupyter notebooks, Db2, Watson Analytics, etc.
  • Data ingestion, using Data Refinery and Cloud Object Storage
  • Data persistence, using Db2 Warehouse on Cloud
  • Data manipulation, using Jupyter notebooks, via R or Python scripts
  • Data visualisation, using Pixie dust or Watson Analytics
  • No ability to audit/log activity
  • Difficult to secure
  • No access to underlying infrastructure
  • Poor reliability and performance
  • Machine learning capability too basic/simple and black box nature means it is difficult to validate/trust
  • Limited ability to customise Watson Analytics visualisation
  • Poor support response times
  • Poor native support for Softlayer S3 storage
  • It certainly helps us as a consultancy and IBM reseller to increase sales revenues (>$200K last year)
  • It has helped customers evaluate IBM technologies and compare them against alternatives in a cost effective and time efficient way
  • It has helped customers implement completely new types of analytic applications and deployments that were not possible for them to perform previously
  • AWS
AWS stacks up very favourably against Watson Studio, and in fact this is what the customer ultimately chose over Watson Studio after an evaluation period due to the sophistication, maturity, security, and capabilities of the AWS components. The downsides of AWS are having to pay for every byte downloaded, and the steep learning curve. The advantages of the Watson Studio environment over AWS are: better support for hybrid deployments (not everything has to go in the cloud); ease of integration with other Watson APIs and components (e.g. NLU, Speech to Text, etc.), and cheaper usage costs
It's a fantastic environment for learning basic Data Science skills; working with insensitive, non-production data; and performing simple data visualisations. It is completely unsuited to enterprise production deployments requiring advanced auditing and security; sophisticated and transparent machine learning; complex analytics and custom data visualisations.