We performed a comparison between Board and IBM Watson Explorer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."By using Board we can do a lot of free analysis. We can change the layout of a table and even the end-user can change the layout of a table. And in Board 11.2 you can save the layout. That's very useful for the customer, it's a very good function."
"The drill down is good for people who have that high level view, because they can do some analysis based on it."
"BOARD technical support is knowledgeable and helpful."
"With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support."
"What is very valuable is the ability to customize. We didn't see a solution out there that really matched exactly what our functional requirements would be. So we were able to work with New Brain, our integrator, and we were able to build from the ground up what we wanted, and I think that's pretty unique to BOARD."
"The benefits are getting the data in one spot, the ability to report dynamically, and version control."
"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."
"I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive."
"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. "
"One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes."
"The engine of the Board should be made powerful like the engine of IBM planning which is more powerful in terms of performance. The consolidated finance area also needs improvement."
"It needs more export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly."
"Sometimes, the data disappears from the product."
"It would be nice to see truly transferable processes from model to model, as well as a method of building repetitive processes."
"The one thing that I think we would like to see in terms of improvement of the application is the ability to print. It's fantastic to have all of these graphic visualization of data, but we're not able to very easily just print... From my perspective, if you can have a little "print" button and then you just click it and it would produce what's on the screen, that would be very helpful."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"The solution is expensive."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary"
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
Earn 20 points
Board is ranked 23rd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 35 reviews while IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 9th in Data Mining. Board is rated 8.6, while IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Board writes "A stable solution with good user-experience, easy deployment but needs some improvement with engine ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". Board is most compared with Anaplan, SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics, Oracle Hyperion and Microsoft Power BI, whereas IBM Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. See our Board vs. IBM Watson Explorer report.
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