Item: IBM Watson Studio on Cloud Pak for Data
Rating: 10
Author: Christopher Penn

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Watson Studio is the first third of IBM's new Watson machine learning data pipeline. It's a powerful, reasonably intuitive, low-code environment for building machine learning models and integrating IBM's machine learning APIs (speech recognition, image recognition, etc.) into your ML pipeline. If you already consume Watson APIs, Watson Studio will help streamline current and future deployments.

Pros and Cons

Integration of IBM Watson APIs such as speech to text, image recognition, personality insights, etc.
SPSS modeler and neural network model provide no-code environments for data scientists to build pipelines quickly.
Enforced best-practices set up POCs for deployment in production with a minimum of re-work.
Estimator validation lets data scientists test and prove different models.

Watson Studio's UI is not always intuitive, especially when it comes to requirements and specific settings.
Documentation is not strong; tutorials and walkthroughs are noticeably light.
Tight integration with IBM APIs also means less well-made integrations to third party data sources and APIs—MySQL support notably absent.

Return on Investment

As a reseller, selling Watson Studio as a machine learning platform package is relatively straightforward.
Buyers and partners know, appreciate, and trust the IBM brand.
Watson Studio models obey best practices, which means they are less subject to human error.

Alternatives Considered

Splunk Enterprise and RapidMiner Studio

As an IBM Business Partner, we are financially incentivized to recommend and deploy IBM solutions where it makes sense to do so for the customer. Against other solutions, few have the governance and security that IBM offers, which is essential for any kind of work in highly regulated industries. IBM's solution may not be the sexiest, but it's the most bulletproof.

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, Alteryx Analytics, KNIME Analytics Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Watson Studio is optimal for experienced data scientists and machine learning professionals to develop and deploy models quickly while enforcing best practices that set up projects for deployment and management down the road. It's not appropriate for people without a data science or machine learning background for production use; the ease of the visual modelers does not mean it makes machine learning easy or intuitive.

IBM Watson Studio: Ideal for Rapid Data Science and ML POCs and Deployments with Watson

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