IBM SPSS/WS
IBM is a global technology company that was founded in 1911. The vendor offers a comprehensive portfolio of advanced analytic solutions.
IBM SPSS is a set of products for advanced analytics, predictive modeling and the deployment of analytics into business processes. SPSS Statistics is an application for advanced statistical analysis and reporting and is most often used for ad hoc statistical analysis and reporting of said results or as a helper application to Modeler. SPSS Modeler is a predictive analytics workbench that includes machine learning, model building and scoring, text analytics, simulation and data preparation with a visual interface focusing on business users with statistical knowledge. SPSS Modeler offers support for the creation, test and deployment of individual data mining models through SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services (C&DS).
IBM’s cognitive APIs, the Watson services, offer pretrained speech-to-text, language and image recognition algorithms. Watson Studio is a cloud-based data science tool that offers notebooks for development in R and Python and the possibility to set up workflows with SPSS Modeler. The integration of SPSS into Watson Studio adds functionality for governance and collaboration to SPSS Modeler and enables groups of users to work with SPSS. In addition, the new IBM Watson Machine Learning Service provides an interface for the partial automation of selecting, training and web service-based deployment of machine learning models. The IBM Decision Optimization products, including CPLEX Optimizer, provide solutions for operations research applications and complement the IBM advanced analytics product set.
Other relevant components in the IBM portfolio include the data management and data warehousing tools, as well as IBM Cognos Analytics with its reporting, dashboarding, data analysis and data visualization functionality. The new version includes functionality from Watson Analytics such as guided data discovery, automated advanced analytics, and cognitive capabilities (e.g., natural language recognition). SPSS supports the import and export of Cognos Framework Manager packages.
User & Use Cases
SPSS and Watson Studio are most often used for data preprocessing (69 percent) and advanced analytics (65 percent). The share of users using SPSS/WS for operationalization is also rather high (36 percent). The maturity of the software and its possibilities for analytical modeling and operationalization make IBM SPSS and Watson Studio well suited to these use cases. The software can be found mostly in medium-sized and large companies but with rather small user bases, as is typical with software geared towards data scientists. IBM’s main competitors include advanced analytics platforms such as Alteryx, KNIME and Matlab as well as products that focus on visual analysis such as Tableau.
Current use vs. planned use
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5 products most often evaluated in competition with IBM SPSS/WS
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Total number of users per company
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Advanced analytics users per company
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Advanced analytics users (as a percentage of all users)
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Company size (number of employees)
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