When comparing this solution to others there are three to four features that are more attractive rather than others. It's user-friendly and easy to deploy.

We evaluated IQ.

Every now and then we would evaluate another vendor like Cloudera or MapR, but at the end of the day, we ended up sticking with EMR because nothing made a compelling enough argument to change.

We did try Cloudera. We liked Cloudera quite a bit, but between the fact that we already had such an investment in EMR and the fact was that Cloudera's cost - it's not that they weren't competitive - just wasn't enough of a cost savings to justify switching. And then MapR came in and tried to sell us on them, and none of us ever saw any benefit for using MapR over any other solutions.

Using Cloudera may have looked a little bit less expensive because Amazon EMR does charge extra fees per node based on the size of the node. When you're using EMR, it can be up to 16 to 32 times the actual original cost of the nodes. But we determined that that extra cost - for us, it was only about two to four times because of the size of the nodes we were using - the penalties weren't as great. And the benefit of not having to manage the infrastructure was enough that we said, "Well, if we want the Cloudera, we would have to do that to a certain extent, potentially." So, we said, "All right, well, it would be more work. So, let's just keep it with EMR."

We were on AWS for the web part so it was logical to take another AWS product, but today we are looking for an acceleration tool. The DevOps part takes a lot of time so we want to integrate with all the scope of MLOps and so we're looking at Databricks. 

I did look at other solutions before choosing Amazon. We did look at Microsoft as well, among others.