IT Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Consultant
2020-09-21T06:33:00Z
Sep 21, 2020
The advice I have for people considering MashZone is that it is very good for specific things. When you have big data you must buy MashZone with Terracotta, because Terracotta is a second Software AG solution with better memory technology. Only using MashZone along with Terracotta will make the processing fast enough. I think the biggest problem with MashZone is that even though you have a lot of widgets and the system is simple to develop with, it is not a very fast system. It is a very simple system to use, more simple than Tableau in my opinion. But the biggest problem is speed. It is not fast with processing. I think because the system is really designed for process analysis, when we analyze a process for our customers, the MashZone is much better than all other solutions. But the database for processes can not be very big. If there are about 40,000 rows for process analysis — and this is a pretty big analysis — then MashZone is enough. But when you want to analyze something using statistics or for financial analysis, MashZone is not a very good system. This is not really what it was designed to do and excel at. On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate MashZone NextGeneration overall as a product as a seven-out-of-ten. The reasons why it gets a seven is because of the problems the product has in processing big data. If I try to analyze big data in MashZone, it is just impossible. I changed the server for a better one and it is still is not enough processing power. This is only my opinion based on the version of the software that we are using (10.3). But now they have a new version (10.5) which has some new features that we are very interested in and maybe I will score the product as more than seven when I have the opportunity to use them. For example, in the new version, Software AG claims that now there is a business component for developing our own templates for MashZone. For many years now, that was impossible. The template changes could only be made by the IT department in JavaScript. It required JavaScript to make the change. Now it is possible to do it in a different way. It is one less problem. The second problem that Software AG said they have tried to address is the speed of MashZone. Prior to this release, MashZone did not have enough capabilities to do proper Gant analysis. Now Software AG says that in new version Gant analysis is better. We do not know for certain because we have not yet put it to the test. For now, when we using version 10.3, that is practically impossible. Of course, something is there to do this type of analysis in version 10.3, but it is very complicated to use.
I would rate MashZone as eight out of ten.
The advice I have for people considering MashZone is that it is very good for specific things. When you have big data you must buy MashZone with Terracotta, because Terracotta is a second Software AG solution with better memory technology. Only using MashZone along with Terracotta will make the processing fast enough. I think the biggest problem with MashZone is that even though you have a lot of widgets and the system is simple to develop with, it is not a very fast system. It is a very simple system to use, more simple than Tableau in my opinion. But the biggest problem is speed. It is not fast with processing. I think because the system is really designed for process analysis, when we analyze a process for our customers, the MashZone is much better than all other solutions. But the database for processes can not be very big. If there are about 40,000 rows for process analysis — and this is a pretty big analysis — then MashZone is enough. But when you want to analyze something using statistics or for financial analysis, MashZone is not a very good system. This is not really what it was designed to do and excel at. On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate MashZone NextGeneration overall as a product as a seven-out-of-ten. The reasons why it gets a seven is because of the problems the product has in processing big data. If I try to analyze big data in MashZone, it is just impossible. I changed the server for a better one and it is still is not enough processing power. This is only my opinion based on the version of the software that we are using (10.3). But now they have a new version (10.5) which has some new features that we are very interested in and maybe I will score the product as more than seven when I have the opportunity to use them. For example, in the new version, Software AG claims that now there is a business component for developing our own templates for MashZone. For many years now, that was impossible. The template changes could only be made by the IT department in JavaScript. It required JavaScript to make the change. Now it is possible to do it in a different way. It is one less problem. The second problem that Software AG said they have tried to address is the speed of MashZone. Prior to this release, MashZone did not have enough capabilities to do proper Gant analysis. Now Software AG says that in new version Gant analysis is better. We do not know for certain because we have not yet put it to the test. For now, when we using version 10.3, that is practically impossible. Of course, something is there to do this type of analysis in version 10.3, but it is very complicated to use.