Back

 Industry News Details

 
Big Data Analytics Software Options Posted on : Aug 31 - 2015

There are many vendors selling products classified as big data analytics software. However, it’s challenging to differentiate these products based on functionality alone, as many of the tools share similar features and capabilities. Additionally, some of the tools exhibit extremely subtle differences.  That being said, your key differentiating factors will likely focus on balancing ease of use, algorithmic sophistication and price in relation to your organization’s capability and level of maturity in analytics.

In this article, we examine products from nine big data analytics software vendors: Alteryx, IBM, KNIME.com, Microsoft, Oracle, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS and Teradata. Some of them provide more than one tool (see the “Leading vendors of big data analytics software” sidebar below for more details about the specific product offerings). These vendors represent different facets of the big data analytics market. Based on the characteristics described in our earlier articles, let’s compare and contrast the ways that the products are targeted to meet the business needs of user organizations.

Considerations for choosing the right big data analytics software

Analyst expertise and skills. Some of the tools are targeted to novice users, some are targeted to expert data analysts, and some are engineered to appeal to both types of users.

Products such as IBM SPSS Modeler, RapidMiner’s tools, Oracle Advanced Analytics and the Automated Analytics version of SAP Predictive Analytics are generally designed to enable users who have little or no background in statistics or data analysis to analyze data, develop analytical models and design analytics workflows with little or no coding. While each vendor wraps the core analytics components with an intuitive user interface to guide the analyst’s progress in data preparation, analysis and then model design and validation, the approach taken may differ, especially when comparing a standalone product (such as RapidMiner) with one that’s a component of a larger suite (such as the Oracle product). View more