Altair Monarch vs. Amazon Tensor Flow

* Individual seat licenses are very expensive, which is one reason we are moving to CMOD/RMS. But RMS has less functionality than standalone Monarch (now known as "Modeler"). I would like to know what improvements we can expect in RMS, I would also ask, what is the future of the standalone version? * In the past there has been a dearth of user discussion and support in the online community, although this seems to be improving with the new "Datawatch Commmunity" (http://community.datawatch.com).

Incentivized

A well-suited scenario for using AWS Tensor Flow is when having a project with a geographically dispersed team, a client overseas and large data to use for training. AWS Tensor Flow is less appropriate when working for clients in regions where it hasn't been allowed yet for use. Since smaller clients are in regions where AWS Tensor Flow hasn't been allowed for use, and those clients traditionally don't have enough hardware, this situation deters a wider use of the tool.

Incentivized

• It allows us to quickly dump large non-ALV SAP reports into Excel. Exporting these reports prior to Modeler was cumbersome at best.
• Customizable models allow us to easily gather required data from the same report running different dates. This is perfect for month-end reports.
• Quick exports.

Incentivized

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows resizable compute capacity in the cloud, providing the necessary elasticity to provide services for both, small and medium-sized businesses.
• Tensor Flow allows us to train our models much faster than in our on-premise equipment.
• Most of the pre-trained models are easy to adapt to our clients' needs.

Incentivized

• Setting up visualizations with time series data requires a good understanding of how the software works. I would like it to be more intuitive. Having said that, time series data is inherently complicated and I don't see any obvious ways to make it simpler. But I'm not a software designer myself; they could put more resources into the user experience.
• Their video training is really helpful and they have a big library of videos, but the videos get out of date as they come out with new versions. I can imagine that it's difficult to keep all the videos updated, but it would be great if the videos were always using the latest major version of the product.
• They need more visualizations. They have a pretty big collection now but it seems like there is often some other way to present and visually analyze data that would be a better/tighter fit with requirements than the visualizations available in the standard product. I understand it is possible to add more visualizations - custom visualizations - but that's beyond my expertise.

Incentivized

• SageMaker isn't available in all regions. This is complicated for some clients overseas.
• For larger instances, when using a GPU, it takes a while to talk to a customer service representative to ask for a limit increase. Given this, it's recommendable to ask in advance for a limit increase in more expensive and larger cases; otherwise, SageMaker will set the limit to zero by default.
• Since the data has to be stored in S3 and copied to training, it doesn't allow to test and debug locally. Therefore, we have to wait a lot to check everything after every trail.

Incentivized

Datawatch recently repositioned Data Pump and essentially priced us out of the market. The initial investment was very inexpensive, but the yearly maintenance contract was viewed as being a little pricey. The only value of the contract was that it included software upgrades. The Professional Services portion of the contract that was meant to provide support was not viewed as being very effective or beneficial.

Incentivized

Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure is better than Amazon Tensor Flow because it provides easier and pre-built capabilities such as Anomaly Detection, Recommendation, and Ranking. AWS is better than IBM Watson ML Studio because it has direct and prebuilt clustering capabilities AWS, like IBM Watson ML Studio, has powerful built-in algorithms, providing a stronger platform when comparing it with MS Azure ML Services and Google ML Engine.

Incentivized

• Data Pump reduces complexity of report solutions by offering a standardized approach for organizing and scheduling
• 97% service level for past 5 years for all of our jobs going through Data Pump

Incentivized

• Positive: It has allowed us to work with our overseas teams without any large hardware investing.
• Positive: Pre-trained models significantly reduce the time to develop solutions for our clients.
• Negative: Since it's a relatively new tool, you have to be careful about not paying for large errors while learning to use the tool.

Incentivized