IBM SPSS Statistics Reviews

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.

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 use SPSS specifically for doing segmentation analysis and customer analysis including various kinds of share model predictions, etc.

The solution has numerous valuable features. We particularly like custom tabs. It's very useful. We end up analyzing a lot of software data, so features related to custom tabs are really helpful.

All of the clustering for multi-related techniques including clustering, factoring, etc. is quite useful.

The cost integration features are very good.

The data preparation skills need improvement. When I compare the solution with other tools or competitors, this solution needs to simplify data preparation. 

The solution needs more planning tools and capabilities.

I've been using the solution for about ten years now.

The solution is very stable. I haven't come across or heard of any problems on the solution. There's no bugs or glitches. It works well.

I don't believe this solution would be the best for companies that need to scale. It doesn't have the level of scalability available to grow very much.

I haven't been in touch with technical support directly, but I have been using their forums to help troubleshoot issues. I've researched some forums. Whenever I encounter issues within the solution, I will actively browse a few forums for blogs for documentation that might provide me with some insights.

I have previously used different solutions. I've used SAS, R, and Minit. There are many other solutions as well that I have tried out at one time or another.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We didn't have any issues with the implementation.

I didn't actually deploy the solution, so I can't speak to how long it took. We use different tools as well that I work with. I can be deployed, but I'm not sure how long it would take an organization exactly.

We have an enterprise-level license with IBM.

Although we're working with IBM right now, we're currently looking for a new data science platform solution. I was hoping to find an open-source tool that could fit our needs in the future. We're evaluating R and Python right now, but they're not quite what we need. On all of our new engagements, we'd really like to use open-source only.

We're an official IBM partner. We have an enterprise license; I'm not sure if we're currently using the latest version or not. We might be on V3 or V4.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I am using SPSS Statistics in many, many, many fields - more than you can imagine. The last one I was working on was with women at the Human Rights Council. I'm also using SPSS Amos for structural equation modeling. I'm using it to analyze data for business, data for engineering, and many other fields. Besides being a professional, I also sometimes advise or solve problems for others who are working with it in business or doing their Ph.D. or master's degree in it. Again, it is useful in many, many fields.

In terms of the features I've found most valuable, I'd say the duration, the correlation, and of course the nonparametric statistics. I use it for reliability and survival analysis, time series, regression models in different solutions, and different types of solutions. I'm using most of the content of SPSS.

I think the duration and time-series need improvement.

Some things need more explanation. For instance, if you are using the automated part in SPSS, you have automatic linear modeling. It gives you the meaning of the result, explaining if it is significant. But most of the package will give you the fixed value, or the p-value, without an explanation as to whether it significant or not. Some beginners might need not just the results, but also an explanation for them.

This already exists in two parts of the SPSS. One for the automatic linear modeling, and the second for nonparametric. The automation, the automatic part, gives you not only the results and the output but also what this output means. For me as a professional, I can explain the results even if it's not included in the output. But if they were to include some explanation for the results, such as is it significantly based on the P-value, that would make SPSS great.

Additionally, there is something else that really needs improvement - the part related to multivariate analysis. The chi-squared for instance. Some packages can give you the chi-squared directly, but in the multivariate part of SPSS, it's not as clear as it should be. So working with the multivariate could be improved or expanded. This last semester I was teaching multivariate to postgraduate students and it was not as clear as it should be. In conclusion, regarding improvements for the package, I can say that multivariate needs improving.

Lastly, some results need to be presented in a more diverse way. For instance, if you are working in biostatistics then sensitivity, specificity, and relative risk need to also be included. Some people don't use SPSS because they need some medical calculations and they think that SPSS cannot calculate it. But if you are working with the older, survival analysis, you can add this part to the medical field. Actually, it is really easy to include it and calculate it for it. As I told you, you can add a medical field part for the study design, such as screening tests, sensitivity, specificity and so on.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for more than 20 years.

I have written five books on using SPSS Statistics and one book for using the Modeler. Two of them were in English for bio-statistics, and the others are in other fields, but in Arabic.

I like the stability and would rate it at more than 95%. If you're working with the package for a long period of time, you understand most of the texts that you need to know.

I told you I wrote five books about using SPSS, so of course, I'm totally impressed with this package more than any other one.

When I was in the United States, I started to use SAS. But for the Middle East, SAS is not as easy as SPSS.

I believe more than 50% of those in the university are working on it, so it's a long scale of users. For instance, tomorrow I am leading training for using the Modeler in a department in the university. All the time, a lot of people ask for a daily cost for using SPSS because it is the most common solution here in Saudi Arabia.

I have never contacted support. I hope I can contact them with a call to improve my notes about the outputs or something.

The initial setup is straightforward and doesn't take more than 20 minutes on average.

I do the deployment myself. We can sometimes download from IBM's site. It doesn't need any help.

We have a package for the university students and teachers. It's a package for graduate students, and the students can use it. They can download it and use it.

We evaluated other options. In general, in the Middle East, we use many different software packages, like SAS, Minitab, and SPSS. But I believe that SPSS might be the number one in the Middle East. I'm talking about Saudi Arabia or Egypt. 

Of course I would recommend SPSS. I advise everyone to use it. As I mentioned, I wrote books about using SPSS. They are used for training and I knew most of the lecturers were using the package.

Time series is a branch in and of itself, and it's very important for forecasting the future. I was suffering until I could simplify this using the SPSS for forecasting or for building time series modeling.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM SPSS Statistics at least a nine.

I'm a senior statistical consultant. We mainly use IBM SPSS to find data and organize it. We have about 10 people in our company that use the product for analysis. The work is seasonal, sometimes we use the product daily and during other periods maybe weekly, monthly or quarterly. It really depends on when the work comes in. Our company uses many different types of software and it's really dependent on the individual situation and requirements of the company. 

Most of the product features are good but I particularly like the linear regression analysis. I also benefit from the import and export of data abilities. 

I believe the product could be improved. I think there is an issue with the charting and visualization, and I don't think it works as well as the competitive product. There is a lot of competition with other software, and I think the visualization and charting should be changed and made easier and more effective. They should also try to include better concepts for big data. I don't know if this can be matched or integrated with the flexibility of Python, because now Python is free. When I try to use another software such as JMP software, JMP makes managing, manipulating and changing the perspectives or the analysis points easier. When you compare or make any statistical search for two variables or more, one by one, X and Y and so on, you refer the variables to the original situation and change it. In JMP, you can just drag and drop and switch columns, rows to columns, and vice versa. It's really easy to use. 

I think the product license is expensive for some people who would be interested in using it, but there is a cheaper version for searches. I think reducing the cost or making a cheaper version for companies should not be a problem. 

In terms of additional features, I think some enhancement on the panel or the main menu would be helpful. Another thing I would hope to be able to do would be to facilitate the results for the user in one main window. There is a window for data and another window for output. I think maybe there could be an enhancement to make SPSS easier to manage and easier to move between data.

The product is very stable, no problems at all. 

The product is easily scalable.

I haven't had much need to contact technical support, only when they upgrade or update my version and something is required to activate it, but not for technical issues. I haven't needed them for that. 

The setup of the product was very simple. It doesn't take more than about 30 minutes. 

I can implement the product myself, particularly if it's for an individual. But for a company or in the corporate sector, that's another issue. I would need a team or an IT consultant.  

The price of the basic product is okay but if I need to take the advanced model then there is a cost for the different levels. For questionnaire purposes, for example, there is very limited use. You pay to install plugins or add-ons to that. There is another feature for that, I believe, that costs around $1,000, but for an advanced model and a lot of extra tools, you might reach around $6,000-7,000. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

Once it is installed it does an important job because it helps with long statistical analysis processes.

You can quickly build models because it does the work for you.

The technical support should be improved.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for one year.

This is a stable product.

This product is scalable and there are three versions. There is a smaller version, a mid-level, and there is a full enterprise version. The licensing can make it difficult to deploy models although it should be possible with the enterprise version. However, I have never tried it.

The technical support is not very useful. You can find help on the internet but if you really have a problem then it can take a while before you get a solution.

The setup is pretty straightforward and I think that you can easily set up your own connection.

My client performed the setup.

Overall, I like this product and I don't have any major things that I would like to change.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

not calculated

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.

My primary use for this solution was to interpret the results of a survey. I made use of correlation methods and other features to perform this analysis.

The most valuable feature is the user interface because you don't need to write code. You can drag and drop selections and the menu is very helpful. You can adjust your parameters and other things, all through the interface.

The licensing model is not popular and should be changed to SaaS.

This solution is not suitable for use with Big Data.

I had been using IBM SPSS Statistics for two or three years. I have changed roles and am not currently working with this solution.

The stability of this solution is good.

The scalability of this solution is not good because we cannot use it with Big Data. Instead, we used IBM SPSS Modeler.

The price of this solution is a little bit high, which was a problem for my company.

This is a product that I recommend for people who do not need to work with Big Data.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.