IBM SPSS Modeler Reviews

Pricing data analytics.

We are putting seven machine learning models in production to start. We may expand up to 10. This is real-time as we are pulling data out of Cognos BI server every morning. We manipulate and reload the data throughout the day based on parameters that come in from the field, then that gets put back into the system and refreshed for the next day.

We have a private cloud, which is our corporate cloud. Everything is done off of a shared server. 

To date, working with IBM SPSS Modeler has been very good, our installers and trainers have been excellent. The product seems to be quite robust and doing what we need.

This is a new installation for us. We have not implemented it fully. It is going live now. Therefore, the impacts have yet to be determined. We are anticipating a more streamlined process.

It handles large data better than the previous system that we were using, which was basically Excel and Access. We serve upwards of 300,000 parts over a 150 regions and we need to crunch a lot of numbers.

The speed of the system could be improved, but I think that will be fixed once we get our data in line.

I do not what additional features that I would like to see in the next release as I am still learning the features in this release!

So far, the stability has been rock solid. It is very good, but slow. The slowness may be because we have not finalized all the background information in SPSS. It still needs some tweaking.

It will scale up to anything we need.

We have not used the technical support yet.

Previously, we were using an ad hoc system that we developed in-house. It was based on Access databases spitting data back into Excel.

It is a very complex system, and we are dealing with a lot of different features, but the installation did a very good job of walking us through it. They made it as painless as possible.

We were looking for an ERP system that would help us streamline the whole process. My director reviewed four or five different scenarios and decided on IBM.

We did look at other vendors, but I cannot name them as I was not part of the selection process.

SPSS and TM1 are so versatile that it depends on how you set it up within your company and with whomever guides them through it, because it is so customizable. You need a good guide and what you want out of it, as it is very transparent.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: ease of use. They should be able to handle our unique situation. We have many branches with many moving parts, and also a lot of internal customers.

People data, survey insights, HR analytics, nominal data, relational data, SEM modeling, logistic regression using nominal or ordinal groups.

Quickness and ease of use with the guarantee of robust modeling techniques and trustworthy accuracy.

Quick insights.

Easier coding language that is more flexible with other platforms. More server capabilities. More graphics.

I used it mostly for the PCA, the principal component analysis, and I have been using that for my bachelor's thesis. It performed pretty well for my task, for the goal of my task.

I think it is the point and drag features that are the most valuable. You can simply click at the windows, and then pull up the functions. What you need is then directly over there, and then you can select the parameters over the windows. Then just click and the results show up.

If IBM could add some of the popular models into the SPSS for further analysis, like popular regression models, I think that would be a helpful improvement. 

I would also like have more options to manipulate the interface of the report, as well as to be able to customize it and make it more personalized. Right now, SPSS doesn't give me that ability to do that.

Six months.

The stability is good. There have been the occasional crashes, when the data goes all over or I have really messed up with the process and it just crashes. 

The scalability is okay but has some limitations.

No, I wasn't using a different solution beforehand. Though it has become the number one option. Before that it was always Excel and Main Tab, but if you want to get a deep statistical report, I would go to SPSS.

The setup was straightforward.

If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good.

I don't think my university looked into any other vendors. We are providing licenses to students and faculty members.

If I had a colleague that was looking for a status analyzer I would recommend that they get started with SPSS. And if they want to go further I would suggest another option like SAS. Because, once again, you'll have more power to develop the algorithms, to improve the algorithms.

We use it to try to do predictive modeling and data exploration. I have a team of people that are working with the tool right now. We have gone through some SPSS training, so primarily we take the data and figure out what they need to try to predict or what they are trying to figure out, then we use the tool to normalize the data, maybe doing some text analytics. We are trying to get into doing some identity resolution with it, so we are using the professional version (the higher version) with it.

It has performed well. We are a bit limited because we are using it on a desktop, but we are moving it into a server architecture so we can have a little bit more horsepower for it. Also, we are getting licenses to do an SPSS server on the back-end, so as to offload some of the work off the desktop. This will help it perform a lot better. However, so far, it has worked pretty well.

We're doing real-time right now, but we are doing batch once we get the server product up and going. In terms of models, we are getting it off the ground. We have been using it for about six months, and we have been just playing with getting our models up and going, so we actually have the whole pure data and Hortonworks analytics products that we are going to be deploying in the analytics environment, that's where our server product will go, then we will have all of the governance pieces in place to start doing production deployment. So, we are almost there.

We are all completely on-premise. It has been fine on-premise, because we host a whole lot of IBM products. Sometimes it gets a little bit convoluted with the licensing. Right now, we just have the fixed user licenses that we deployed. We are trying to get some floating licenses out there to expand the use of it to a bunch of other people.

It has provided us a lot of small wins that we could bring to our leadership and it has given them confidence with what we were doing in regards to analytics. We have used this to help us pursue bigger, better products, such as IBM PureData. It was a stepping stone, a launching off point, for much bigger products with IBM.

Our go live process has change a little bit compared to a previously programmatic process. We are still getting it built out right now so we are not quite where it is completely mature.

All the statistical models that you are able to access. 

We have integration where you can write third-party apps. This sort of feature opens it up to being able to do anything you want. 

It gives you a GUI interface, which is a lot more user-friendly and easier to use compared to writing R scripts or Python, like some Anaconda type code. It makes it more open and accessible to users that are not as familiar with programming.

We have been able to do some predictive modeling with it. For a business case example: It definitely helped identify issues in the airline industry. The model was able to uncover a few airlines that had some anomalous behavior that we were able to pursue the issues and get them corrected.

The platform that you can deploy it on needs improvement because I think it is Windows only. I do not think it can run off a Red Hat, like the server products. I am pretty sure it is Windows and AIX only. Every company is looking at solutions that go towards Red Hat, so if that is not offered, that would be one thing. 

It seems very stable. SPSS seems like a very mature product. We have not had any issues with it at all.

It is pretty scalable because you can have an SPSS server that we can work to offload, and it seems like we could deploy it to many people if we had the money. It is a little bit costly, but that is with any product like this. Compared to SAS, FICO, or any of their competitors, I think it is comparable.

We used technical support for licensing. The experience was okay. It took us a week or two to try to get over their hurdles. 

We have direct contact with some IBM partners that work with us directly, so we just go to them when we have any technical issues. This is more on the user end of using the product, and they are very helpful.

We were using Excel and beating the heck out of it. We realized with Excel reaching its limits that we need to find out other options. We started to use R, then uncovered this IBM solution by our actual IBM rep, who found that we had licenses for this parked at another location that were not being used. So, we decided to jump right in and we got some training on it.

The initial setup was somewhere in between straightforward and complex. I would not say complex. It seemed pretty straightforward. I think anything that made it more complicated was about our environment, not about the tool itself. 

Cost can be a consideration or a factor when looking to try to deploy to more people. Everybody has to be cost conscious, so find a way to receive bigger bundle discounts. We use a lot of IBM products, so I assume we are getting some discounts now.

Just IBM.

Once you get to the limits of Excel, then you go out and get your pick. Go with a product you know and a vendor you already know

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We have familiarity with this vendor already. We are already in IBM shops, so it made it easy to go after those products because we already had a good relationship with them.

SPSS Modeler is a friendly interface for a beginner user. This program covers all data preparation and pre-processing techniques. The model can be selected from the recommendation of the program, semi-automatic with predefined parameters for each model (or user-defined), and tuning the appropriated model.

Modeler is the program, which based on the CRISP-DM process, to cover the whole data mining process. It can be modified for the machine learning algorithm by using R or Python code. 

New algorithms are added into every version of Modeler, e.g., SMOTE, random forest, etc. The Derive node is used for the syntax code to derive the data.

Data encoding is friendly for UTF-8. The unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler. Finally, the standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection.

Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms with advanced tuning capabilities and integration with Python.

Customer related tasks, such as: lifetime value, acquisition, retention, cross-sell and up-sell, segmentation. Fraud detection, recommender systems, sentiment analysis, and many more.

It would be beneficial if the tool would include more well-known machine learning algorithms. However, IBM already started to include several of these algorithms by implementing Python code. Plus, each user is capable of implementing his/her own machine learning algorithm in either Python or R.

Since 2009.

The product is very stable. There were however few instances when too intensive tasks were performed and the tool froze and the unsaved activity was lost. I understood that in the latest version IBM addressed this issue and an automated saving capability of the workflow is available.

The work can be easily scaled even without additional components offered by IBM, but it really depends on each organization. Some research is necessary in order to understand how to bypass those components, but in the end a substantial amount of money would be saved. IBM provides documentation regarding each component that SPSS Modeler could interact with.

Based on the licensing purchased technical support is provided and is of great value. IBM SPSS Modeler offers a very comprehensive online documentation too.

I used MatLab before and switched because of the ease of use and continued to use it because of the integration with Python.

To local setup of each license is straightforward. If an organization plans on sharing workflows amongst team members or automate tasks, additional components need to be purchased and set up. I have not used other components provided by IBM, but most likely the setup of those would be straightforward too.

Having in mind all four tools from Garner’s top quadrant, the pricing of this tool is competitive and it reflects the quality that it offers. I am of the impression that the price can be adjusted depending on the plans that each organization has.

With respect to the licensing, there are different options available and it really depends on the needs of each organization. However, I believe the basic licensing is suitable for most of the cases.

I evaluated and tested SAS Enterprise Miner and KNIME.

It is a great tool even for an individual with no or basic predictive modeling experience. Due to the very detailed online documentation and examples that IBM SPSS Modeler provides, even a novice employee can start using the tool and become productive in a short period of time. When it comes to advanced users that prefer to code in Python or R, IBM SPSS Modeler offers the capability to write Python or R code and create nodes for each specific task that can be easily reused just by drawing and dropping the nodes on the canvas.