We performed a comparison between IBM Watson Explorer and Information Builders WebFOCUS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Mining solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The most valuable feature is building ad hoc reports."
"I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It's highly scalable and can handle significant data volumes."
"It stands out for its ability to work across different platforms, support mainframe data, offer cloud integration, automate report scheduling, and provide a robust scripting language."
"The solution can read and write 500 different types of outputs."
"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."
"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."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"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"
"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 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"
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"The solution can be improved by adding more automated options for reporting."
"When it comes to customer support, we don't always reach the right person. Sometimes, we get junior-level reps who aren't as knowledgeable as we are."
"The challenge lies not in what the tool can do but in how you use it and understand the data."
"If there were to be any improvements right now, their documentation needs to get in sync with their product."
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IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 9th in Data Mining while Information Builders WebFOCUS is ranked 6th in Predictive Analytics with 18 reviews. IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4, while Information Builders WebFOCUS is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Information Builders WebFOCUS writes "A flexible mainframe product with unique file features and a rock solid scheduling feature". IBM Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, whereas Information Builders WebFOCUS is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Alteryx and Databricks. See our IBM Watson Explorer vs. Information Builders WebFOCUS report.
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