IBM SPSS Statistics Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for statistical approaches, performing ED tests, and multi-armed bandit tests. It gathers the results that help us to decide on what type of campaign works best, and what type of branding would work best.

The features that I find to be the most valuable are the anomaly detection and its statistics. The clustering statistics are important as well as the usual old-school statistical analysis called ANOVA and ANCOVA. They are critical.

There were some new approaches that I hadn't used before. 

The best part is that they have an algorithm handbook, so you can open it up and understand how it works, and if it is useful, this is very important. Many people don't read these types of handbooks, but they should because it was very useful and I use it a lot.

I don't know if this solution is available on the cloud. If it is then we should be using it because it would be even better. The on-premises version is lax in terms of computational capability, so we have to use a more powerful computer.

Some new tools will be available soon with self-explanatory statistical results, and they have multi-language generations that create automatic reports with detailed explanations of the statistical reports. I wish that they were more advanced.

Some areas that need improvement or should be more advanced are in the reporting. The statistics should be more self-explanatory with detailed automated reports.

You should be able to walk through with the statistical schematics because some of the matters are advanced, and if you don't have a full understanding or you don't remember how to get the desired results then there should be a guide or a walkthrough to help and explain how it should be applied.

In the next release, they should have some new statistical approaches that can be applied, some new memory detection, and new clustering techniques.

Also, some new statistical methods to increase the different model's explainability would be helpful.

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

This solution is stable.

This solution is not scalable.

If I had known or implemented the version, then it may be scalable. The problem is that it's used on the original core and it's receiving a long analysis. It should be able to use multi-cores, and CPU, but it doesn't do anything like that. 

I am the only user.

When you contact support, sometimes it takes a while because they don't know how to help you resolve your issue. In turn, they contact other areas of support and it takes time to get back to you.

The support is just ok, and you have to contact someone who works in the US or in Europe.

Previously I was using SAP Statistics. It was old-school, so I switched to Visual Statistics and it was useful. From there, we switched IBM SPSS Statistics. It is a good solution but it would be even better if it had some automated skills.

The initial setup was a little bit complex.

It took half of an evening to complete the setup and implementation, mainly waiting on support to help with issues.

I did the implementation myself. I did not use a vendor or integrator.

It's a pretty old-school statistical tool but it's useful.

I would recommend it, although there are some better tools available.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Well, actually, in terms of the technique that we use, and also the implementation, I prefer to use SPSS Clementine right now. It can cover a big amount of data, instead of just basic SPSS where you have limitations, how many observations you can analyze. In terms of the features, I think that the modelling section in IBM SPSS Clementine is very good. it has a lot of modeling techniques compared to other tools.

Similar to other tools, we can identify the pattern of the customers and we can differentiate between which customers we should target, which customer we should not target, and do some basic analysis. I think that's the thing that helps our organization.

Perhaps in terms of visualization. It's not really easy to do some data visualization, just simple, descriptive analysis in SPSS. I think that could be an area for improvement.

Also, right now we're handling more and more data. Maybe, in the future, they can improve on that. 

Also on the specialization, I think IBM SPSS can improve on that.

I've actually been using SPSS since I was in University, so it's around 10 years. 

When I was in college I used the basic SPSS, but when I was in the company I use SPSS Clementine. It is specialized for modeling.

Not much. I think it's good enough.

Up until now, not really. In telecom, we have a really big amount of data. I think that's not really been a problem for SPSS to handle.

I used several kinds of tools. It depends on the organization, what it already has. For example, in Alliance, right now, we already have our own solutions, so I just follow their organization rules and the preference. I have no preference in terms of the tools that I use.

I don't know. I'm not the IT guy who set up the tools.

As I said, I just follow what the company preference is for using tools. I'm not doing evaluation between products. The tool is already in place in the company, I just use it.

Regarding SPSS basic, I think the buyer should understand what are the requirements of the organization. So if it requires lot of data processing, maybe switching to IBM SPSS Clementine would be better for the buyer. It depends on the requirements. But in terms of the simplicity, I think the SPSS basic can handle it.

We use IBM SPSS Statistics as well as the Modeler. I would say 70% of our work is on Statistics and 30% is on the Modeler.

I'm an independent consultant and my clients have lots of clinical level laboratories. Clinical companies, pharma companies, like Cipla, Biocon, etc. And also logistic companies, like Maersk and Blue Dot. I do the clinical analysis of their data. These companies provide the data and I give them the results. The customer gets the results in whatever format they want. All these companies that I work with also have software other than IBM SPSS. For example, Visual Analytics, SAP Discovery, and solutions like that. So I have to do a liaison with all these other software to fetch the data and present it to the client in whichever format they prefer because there are some features which IBM SPSS statistics has which SAS doesn't have. And there are a lot of features that SAS Visual Analytics has that IBM SPSS doesn't have. So it's a trade-off between these two. I do the liaising with all the partners.

The features that I have found most valuable are the Bayesian statistics and descriptive statistics. I use these more often because in pharma companies and clinical hospitals they make the medicines by taking the feedback from different patients. For example, there could be a neuro-disorder patient or a normal IT employee who may be an introvert, confined to his own space and doesn't want to mingle with people or more inclined towards reading books and stuff like that. You have a cross-section of the community. If a patient comes to the doctors with a little bit of mental depression because of the work pressure or anything else, we collect this data, put up a questionnaire to him about his personality traits, why he's feeling depressed, what are the factors affecting his mental attitude and those kinds of questions and we collect that kind of data. Depending on the data we draw a graph and we give a statistical analysis to the doctors, as well.

Then simultaneously, we give this feedback to the pharma companies, so that depending on the data, they determine which medicine they have and what medicine they could develop. That is the kind of work that we do.

I understand that we're talking about IBM SPSS Statistics, it's a mathematical tool. Fine. Everybody knows that. It is a statistical tool. Having said that, if they could make it a little bit graphical then people who work on IBM SPSS need not depend on other software, like SAP Lumira or something like that, for the regeneration and graphical image of the entire data. That graphical GUI content should be encapsulated in the SPSS package. That's what I mean. 

I know that SPSS is a statistical tool but it should also include a little bit of analytical behavior. You can call it augmented analysis or predictive analysis. The bottom line is it should have more graphical and analytical capabilities.

There are so many formulas which you can encapsulate in this IBM statistical tool. I don't have all the formulas off the top of my head right now, but for any statistical tool for that matter, regardless of the company, it should encapsulate these to the maximum. All the statistical tools and formulae which are taught. I expect that SPSS encapsulates all those formulas, it has a good amount of descriptors, chi-square distribution, ANOVA, etc... you have all the things, but if anything, any theory or formula is missing, I would suggest to SPSS to include that also and market it accordingly so that they can be a front runner in this market, in this segment.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for three years.

It is a stable solution. There's no doubt. But you know, the stability has to be evolving every day. It's not that today I'm stable. Stability is not static. It is dynamic. My effective operative stability will not be carried forward to future generations without any hassles. No, it's not like that. Every day you have to evolve in the technologies to meet the demands.

As I told you earlier, SPSS still has to mature in terms of fetching data from the high volume data databases, like SAP HANA can. 

SAP HANA is a column level database, a columnar database, it's not a low level database. So SPSS has to show that kind of maturity. I assume that they'll scale up because IBM knows how to tackle the market.

In terms of scalbility, it is scalable. There is a scalability fee for this kind of package. The business package can be measured only with the amount of data it can analyze. 

Because if I talk about the Oracle database or the RNC database, the measure of scalability depends on the number of notes I can add to the RSE cluster, how much data will my database be able to handle, and what kind of hardware requirements I need. The IBM package is just a normal package. It doesn't have a SPSS package to measure the scalability. There's only one factor, how much volume of data it can analyze at any point of time. Take an example of its competitor, SAS. SAS analytical software has a server called Laser Server, an ASR server, which is capable of handling around 120 terabytes of data at a time.

That kind of thing should be here. I can't assume that SPSS as a front-end tool can assess that much volume of data. Having said that, it should have some kind of work around or a bigger version, just like SAP has given three versions of Lumira Discovery, Lumira designer and business studio. So on the same lines SPSS should have options for a normal user or for an advanced user which can take more amount of data.

Their customer service is pretty good. IBM is always customer oriented. I worked at IBM earlier, I know what kind of customer service they have. I worked in IBM at a prior date in India. They're very customer oriented, very customer focused. They don't let their customers down, even if the customer is bad, they'll politely try to resolve the issue. They focus on resolving the issue rather than getting into egos and all that stuff. I rate nine out of 10 on tech support. It's awesome.

I'm a pure IT consultant. And in addition to IBM SPSS, I'm also a SAP consultant. I work on SAP Lumira, I work on SAP HANA. I work on SAP S400 material management, logistical management, which includes the SCM MM, PP and the SV modules. I'm also a SAS consultant. I'm a sales, regional medical consultant. I have done the codes in SAS breakthrough modeling. I'm also an Oracle DBA. I worked on almost all the versions of Oracle right from 7.3 to Oracle 18 C. 19 C also, but 18 C is the stable one. So I'm an Oracle Meraki consultant RSE, real application, cluster consultants, and a golden gate expert.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Although I'm not an SPSS admin, per se, I was part of the SPSS installation. Basically what happens when you install any SPSS statistics package is a company involves both the admin guy and also the technical consultant who will be working on it so that they can work in tandem and make the installation perfect.

I was involved with the installation team, as well. It is pretty simple. It's not that complex. I think the versatility of IBM SPSS Statistics tool is very evident, it's good. You have the ability to fetch and analyze the different sets of data, whether it is a CSV from a separated value, or other data from the Oracle database, or other older database such as Dbase or redundant spreadsheets like Lotus 1,2,3 or Excel. You have everything. On that count, I gave IBM a nine out of 10. But there are drawbacks too, because IBM SPSS is not able to fetch the data from new databases like SAP HANA or SAP BW HANA. SAP HANA got introduced in 2011, but it became famous more in 2015.

The same is the case with BW HANA, the business warehouse for HANA, and any statistical tool which is not capable of fetching data from this volume, this database. SAP HANA is a numerary database. So any statistical tool which is not able to fetch data from these databases will not be able to sustain itself in the market for long. But yeah, there are some workarounds where people fetch the data from HANA into some of the data sets and transfer the same data set into SPSS to work through the indirect path. But SPSS has to pull up its socks to fetch data from heterogeneous environments, whether it be SAP, HANA or whether it is a MongoDB or anything, any RDBMS, or DBMS on this earth. That kind of flexibility should be there in SPSS.

I would recommend this product. I teach statistics at a college in Bangalore, and I use the IBM statistics, which my students have bought for $29 per month. We use IBM Statistics to learn statistical analysis of data because visualization data is different than statistical analysis. I totally recommend IBM SPSS, even in top business schools, like IAM in India. I went on a guest lecture there and I recommended IBM SPSS to IAM.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine.

I absolutely like the product. That's the reason I recommend all of my students buy SPSS.

My primary use for IBM SPSS Statistics is as a user and a consultant.

I use it for my research in market analytics. I also use it for cluster analysis for customers. Currently, my eight students in university are using it in their projects. I think that IBM SPSS has improved very much and its data mining capabilities are also very good. I suggest it as a powerful research tool for anybody in different areas.

I work mostly with market analytics. I think that it's good in different areas. For example, some of my students in university also use it for factor analysis and component analysis. I also use it for descriptive statistics describing a population, and for information analysis. Its application for regulation analysis is very good. And I use it in my private work, too. 

I think that it's easy to use because of its variable inference. It has two variable ports and the variable experience is very nice because every variable has its own purpose. It has the ability to easily change any variable in our research.

In terms of what can be improved, currently, I don't have any ideas because I think that it's in very good shape. It compares with its peers. 

I do think that the design of the experience can be improved.

Also, I think that it can improve its ability to import or export the results from other software.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for more than five or six years.

Right now, there are 5 or 6 users in my company using the product. I have plans to increase usage because currently, I am working with some new customers on their market analysis and ideas. So I'll introduce this to them for their future analysis.

Regarding the SPSS technical support - I don't have any problems. I can find any answers on the internet or by searching on their site. I don't have any problems in this area.

I currently work with MiniTask software and Microsoft Excel for analysis in my various work.

In terms of initial setup, I don't have any problem opening it. It usually takes less than half an hour to deploy.

I think that IBM SPSS Statistics is a very powerful analytical tool, even for multivariate statistics. Other software solutions that I mentioned don't have these capabilities and are weaker than SPSS.

I think that it is a very good analysis tool for many different areas. For example, recently I found many applicable uses in my research and for market analysis. SPSS can be deployed as a very powerful tool. I am now consulting with very different customers in various areas to improve their the analytical tools with their analytics team.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the IBM SPSS about eight or nine. To make it a 10, I suggest improving the design that experiments are run on.

The company is primarily using the solution as a statistical tool.

Since we are using the software as a statistical tool, I would say the best aspects of it are the regression and segmentation capabilities. That said, I've used it for all sorts of things.

The solution needs to make it easier to upgrade the software. Right now it's quite difficult. I always have to get a third party involved to upgrade the solution. This is one of the main reasons why I tend not to upgrade it very often and may not be using the most current version of the service.

It would be helpful if there was better documentation on how to properly use the solution. A beginner's guide on how to use the various programming functions within the product would be so useful to a lot of people. I found that everything was very confusing at first. Having clear documentation would help alleviate that.

The solution needs to focus on better functionality for correspondence analysis.

The company has been using the solution for about two years at this point.

The solution is stable. There are no problems with reliability. It doesn't crash. there aren't bugs or glitches that we need to deal with. It's good.

We've found the solution to be very scalable. If a company needs to scale up, they can do so quite easily.

Currently, we are only operating with two licenses.

It's used a fair amount. However, obviously, since the COVID-19 lockdown, work has been very slow. Right now, it's not being used very much. I'm probably not planning to increase my usage due to the fact that I need to first get sales back up to where they were near the beginning of the year, before the quarantining and social distancing.

I've been in touch with technical support and have sought their help with a few support issues. So far, I've been satisfied with the level of attention they've given us. I consider them to be very good.

We didn't previously use a different solution. This company is quite new, and we've been using this solution from the beginning. However, I do use other tools to supplement this package. Some of it is third-party software, and some of it is my own software that I have written.

The initial setup is not straightforward at all. It's quite complex. So much so that we don't handle the set up in-house. We need to contract out the work to make sure it is done correctly.

We were a new company when we originally implemented it two years ago. There wasn't any implementation strategy other than to get it up and running and start using it. I basically bought it from a supplier of SPSS. They deployed it on our behalf as we didn't have the capabilities to do so ourselves. There were issues with it even with help. Those didn't get resolved until a number of months down the line. It's now completely fine.

We had a third party handle the implementation for us. We also have a third party handle the upgrade process.

We're just a customer. We don't have any special working relationship with IBM. We may not be using the latest version of the solution. It's been about a year since I have last updated it.

I'd advise other organizations considering implementing the solution to make sure that they find a partner or somebody who can help them handle the solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the advanced analytics features or asset maintenance for IBM Maximo.

You can find a complete algorithm in the solution and use it. You don't need to write your own algorithms for predictive analytics. That's the most valuable feature and the main one we use.

Each algorithm could be more adaptable to some industry-specific areas, or, in some cases, adapted for maintenance.

I've been working with SPSS for three or four years.

For our purposes, and how we use it, I've found it to be very stable.

The solution is scalable, but our system isn't so big. We just use it for simple scenarios. However, I believe this solution to have similar scalability capabilities to other IBM products. We have approximately ten users on the solution currently.

We don't reach out to IBM support directly. We have a good relationship with a local office and always get help from them if we need it. We don't use the official IBM support as our issues are usually quite small.

I didn't handle the initial setup, however, I don't think it's too complex. The team, as far as I know, didn't have any issues.

I've been working with SPSS for three or four years, but have limited knowledge of the product because we only used it for one project.

We use the on-premises deployment model. We're IBM partners.

I'd recommend the solution for the purposes of predictive analytics. I'm not sure about other use cases. SPSS can be used also for some other solutions in the area of advanced analytics, or for predictive analytics. 

I can recommend it, as it's a good, stable solution with a proven track record.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We do data collection. We have a data collection plan, and we analyze the data and estimate how we can create capacity within the processes. Afterward, we just hand it out to our development team.

Capability analysis is one of the main and valuable functions. We also do some hypothesis testing in Minitab and summary stats. These are the functions that we find very useful.

If there is any self-generation data collection plan (DCP), it would be helpful in gathering data. It would also be useful if there is a function to scale it up to, let's say, UiPath and have it consolidate and integrate into a UiPath solution.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years. 

It has some bugs off and on, but nothing has been a roadblock for us.

We have 500 users of this solution. I'm coming from an organization with 40,000 people.

I have not dealt with tech support.

We don't deal with that. The IT guys install it on our computers, and we just run it. That's it.

I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics an eight out of ten.

In our company, we have about 2000 workers. I use K-means algorithms all the time. So, for example, say we want to classify workers to do better studies by groupings. Maybe we want to target groups of workers who tend to make more errors so we can concentrate on reducing the effects of this issue. We can further classify the grouping in terms of age and in terms of year of services in the company or other ways that may be helpful. After we have found the grouping of people, we can do other types of analysis and the result of the study can be used to apply solutions. In this case, where we are looking to reduce errors, it might be a solution to deploy more supervision and evaluate more of the variables from the group of the employee that we have isolated to analyze performance issues. For example, we may want to reduce excessive overtime to enhance alertness. We are use TFS (Team Foundation Server) and we use the K-means algorithm to help optimize the behaviors in the groups that we identify.  

I think in the future this kind of algorithm will be used widely by people to predict many things and to improve the performance of businesses and individuals.  

I like that the solution provides many built-in options for us. They have many existing algorithms that we can use. Using them effectively depends on us because we have to understand how to utilize any particular solution. But actually, the product is at a good level when it comes to ease-of-use. You have to have the data first to work with. You retrieve data you want to use from the database and you format the data and put it to the SPSS. Then you do analysis and from that, you can take better steps towards a business solution based on the results the analysis returns.  

The areas of SPSS Statics that have room for improvement — where it can be simplified to make it better — have to do with how you connect the SPSS solution with the data. They could provide enhancements like a query console so we can connect to the database and feed data more easily into SPSS. That could be really beneficial and save time and effort. Just enhancing the tools to collect the data would be significant.  

One other enhancement I would like to see is the ability to create higher-level presentations. When you are finished processing the data, you come up with the result. If you are a technician or a data analyst it is not so hard to look at the data. But what I think would be a nice addition is to create presentations. The bosses at a higher level do not want to see the raw data and to show the data is not so nice and easy for them to understand. Some ways to do more to create a presentation — something that is easier to look at and understand — would be good. The ability to do this should be improved.  

They need to improve the ability to connect to the databases, provide a query console and query windows. The engine for processing is there already, but the data feed has to be better. Then provide ways to present the result differently. Maybe graphic presentation options would be good so understanding the results can be more intuitive for the user.  

We have been using the IBM SPSS solution for about a year.  

The stability of SPSS Statistics doesn't seem to have bugs, glitches, or crashes. It's pretty stable and it functions well under the loads we have tested. The number of SPSS users is currently not more than 10 people. The data that we process with the SPSS is never really more than 2000 rows. So we only know that it is stable at this level of usage so far. If there is an opportunity to process 100,000 rows, I don't know what the performance would be. From what I know we would not see any problems, but so far our usage is limited.  

While we don't really know yet what the performance will be like under greater loads for big data, I am pretty confident that the product is very scalable.  

We have had contact with the IBM SPSS technical support team through the phone and they help us through what they call the TeamViewer. They can assist us promptly and I think the service is good. We are satisfied with the level of technical support we receive.  

We did not use a different solution because we are trying to stay with Oracle and IBM solutions for compatibility and dependability.  

The initial setup of the product is easy.  

We did not do the deployment ourselves, we had someone do it. Even though it was not me who did the deployment, I know how they did it and was involved with the group who did it. So I am experienced with the initial setup but asked for assistance from integrators to not divert internal resources and be sure it was done right.  

My advice to other users is that if they are not doing proper data analysis that there are other, better solutions like SPSS to predict and to analyze the data. Assuming the data is already there, they may just be printing a report or pulling a PDF or filling information into the database. But they are not really doing what they can with the data to use it.  

Now there are better solutions we can use and should use to produce information from the data in a way we did not before. It is a better way and the way of the future for data analysis. We need to use predictive algorithms and AI to get more from the information we collect and use it to create better solutions for our businesses. Data analysis is different now than it was only maybe 5 years ago. We can perfect the data and come up with facts from that analysis that we can use for predictions that will help make looking into the future with prediction more viable and accurate.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics as a 7 out of 10. To improve that score they need to enhance the data access and export so that it will be less work, add dashboards for queries and give more options for reporting output.