IBM SPSS Statistics Reviews

SPSS is a statistical dashboard that gives you a quick view of your data. We're a community college, so we use SPSS for analyzing all kinds of data. It's things like enrollments, transfers, new students, returning students, dropped classes, etc.

The SPSS interface is very accessible and user-friendly. It's really easy to get information in it. I've shared it with experts and beginners, and everyone can navigate it. It's a dashboard where they can get more information. And then, if they want to do a deeper dive into some things, they tell us, and we will work with the research department. We can either add or point to the field or fields and give them some more details. 

Say, for example, you wanted to see things like class registration broken down by area of study. So instead of just looking at enrollment, you can dive into specifics about which courses students are taking and what popular disciplines. We can do all that with SPSS. 

It's also customizable. You can add or remove features as needed to make it fit what you're looking for. Instructions for how to do this are all over our website. For example, on the research page, you see a default report, but you can pretty much create your own version that highlights what you want to show.

I'd like to see them use more artificial intelligence. It should be smart enough to do predictions and everything based on what you input. Right now, that mostly depends on the know-how of the user. But if it had some AI, maybe it could guess what you're looking for based on what you're clicking. So it might make a suggestion like, "I think you're looking for this because you've been hovering on this, this and that" 

For example, say you're clicking on a bunch of data related to enrollment, it might ask if you'd like to see enrollment projections. Or you're looking at diversity and want to break it down by race, religion, gender, and age so you can look for patterns. It should be smart enough.

I've been using IBM SPSS since 2002. 

SPSS is very reliable. So once it's up and running, there's little maintenance unless your network goes down. It's pretty much like Microsoft Office or those standalone programs. They keep running. And I haven't hit a wall where there are so many transactions that it breaks or pauses. You can connect a 2 kilobyte database to a terabyte database. It's just a matter of processing time, but it processes nonetheless. There are no hiccups or anything.

It's running on-premises, so you're only limited by your resources, not theirs. SPSS is a product that sits on the server or your PC, and it works. So if your PC is very old, of course, everything else won't work correctly there.

We haven't had to call IBM tech support. I called IBM once for a discount but never for support. When we switched from a single user to a tiered license a few years back, I recommended adopting special pricing for schools. IBM could verify this easily by looking at the users' school email addresses. Customer service was pretty smooth. Once we opened a ticket, they connected us to their sales, and we got the pricing we were looking for. 

It's like Excel. You connect your input to it, and there you go. Dive in.

You can download it for free, but if you want to enable the professional features, you can buy one license if that's all you need. But if you have many collaborators and want to add more contributors to your site or dashboard, you should think about tiers or a site license, depending on what you need. They have all flavors of licensing.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics eight out of 10. It's a good starting point if you have a modest budget because you can start for free. Unfortunately, SPSS does not have AI capabilities. And when I say AI capabilities, I mean something similar to what you see on a stock trading platform. Based on the stocks and index funds you've been browsing, it will suggest similar things that you might be looking for. I want SPSS to have that kind of capability because it engages users and saves a lot of time by showing you exactly what you want to see. This could be in newer versions that I haven't used, and maybe I'm missing out. But to my knowledge, they don't have this yet. That's why I rate it an eight. Nowadays, a lot of people are putting AI in their products. Some of it is good, some bad. But if it's good AI, it can be helpful.

I primarily use the solution for data analysis.

Some time I have used it RFM analysis, in sales. It has given good insight for improvement

The tests, videos, and tools that are the most useful depend on what objective the company has, but all of the features are quite good.

The solution is very comprehensive, especially compared to Minitabs, which is considered more for manufacturing. However, whatever data you want to analyze can be handled with SPSS.

One of the areas that should be similar to Minitabs is the use of blogs. The Minitabs blog helps users understand the tools and gives lots of practical examples. Following the SPSS manual is cumbersome. It's a good, exhaustive manual, but it's not practical to use. With Minitabs, you can go to the blogs and find specific articles written about various components and it's very helpful. Without blogs, we find SPSS more complicated.

I've been using the solution for one or two years.

The stability of the solution is good. We've never faced any issues.

The solution is scalable.

I haven't really used technical support. Mostly I use Google to look for answers to my questions.

We currently use both SPSS and Minitabs. We prefer Minitabs, but if we don't find a solution on it, we switch to SPSS.

In comparison to Minitabs, the initial setup was more complex. The solution has a lot of options and we weren't sure which were the best to use, and that made the experience frustrating. In the end, the deployment took longer than Minitabs.

NA

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I'd advise users to think about using Minitabs. The solution is simpler. However, if you are working with big data, SPSS is better. For large data sets, there's nothing better than SPSS.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher, but it's quite a complex product.

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.

I am using IBM SPSS Statistics mainly for analyzing pieces of research and taking simple cross-tabulations, and then on through the multi-variant analysis. It's most useful with multi-variant. There is so much simplistic nonsense produced by people who always do it by social class and nothing else.

The most valuable feature of IBM SPSS Statistics is all the functionality it provides. Additionally, it is simple to do the five-way analysis that you can into multidimensional setup space. It's the multidimensional space facility that is most useful.

IBM SPSS Statistics could improve the visual outputs where you are producing, for example, a graph for a company board of directors, or an advert.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics since the late 70s or early 80s.

IBM SPSS Statistics is a stable solution.

I have used IBM SPSS Statistics for hundreds of thousands of cases, but not into the millions. It's worked very well. It is scalable.

There are approximately 100 people are using this solution in the university.

I did not set up the solution. I only need to log in to the universities servers page and download it from there.

The price of IBM SPSS Statistics could improve.

The price is a reason one of the reasons why the university chose IBM SPSS Statistics.

My advice to others is they should get a very small data set, a few hundred cases perhaps, and start off with some frequencies and some cross tabs and build out from there.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine 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.

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.  

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 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.