HCL Actian Data Platform vs. IBM Netezza Performance Server

VectorWise is suitable to be a departmental data mart database or an operational data store (ODS). It is not suitable for enterprise data warehouse database.

Incentivized

Netezza Performance Server enhances the data scientist's ability to rapidly design, train, and deploy machine learning models in the database. Netezza Performance Server is essential for implementing cognitive machine learning, providing data scientists with in-database analytics, and enabling them to collaborate on a single platform. Netezza Performance Server supports the use of built-in Spark as well as Python and R for rapid and sophisticated data science and machine learning adoption at scale.

Incentivized

• The support community was not as robust as you would find in a Mulesoft or Informatica environment. Given time and growth, it’s possible it will blossom, but for now it is minimal.
• Training is always a big thing for us, and the tool was not expansive enough for us to implement our own internal training program. There was some online training, and we acquired an expert when we brought on the new company, but some additional training tools would have helped the tool grown its user base internally.
• Not a lot to set it apart from the competition. Most of the features are available with other more established tools, but for a small company that maybe grew too quickly and needs to get its arms around many different data sources, I can see the appeal. Not really geared for larger firms.

Incentivized

• The speed of operations is really second to none
• The data control aspect is really effective and very useful
• Stability and no latency issues notices during operations

Incentivized

• As I said before, more training or greater visibility to training tools/options would be a plus. It’s easy to publish YouTube videos these days, I think they should make more of them.
• Differentiation would help, there’s not a lot out there to drive you to buy the product if you are well informed in the market. If you know the market, you steer towards the large or trendy products. It’s a good product, but lost in the noise of the field I think.
• Hitching the wagon to a major software brand (like Mule did to Salesforce) would help grow the user base, and thus increase the activity in the support community. More users also translates into product champions.

Incentivized

• The cost is expensive for medium-sized and smaller companies.
• IBM could bring back the technical account managers.
• The procurement process is a hassle.

Incentivized

We didn’t actually choose Actian, it arrived as part of an acquisition, and really served its purpose both when it was used by the smaller firm we acquired as well as afterwards when we were extracting data and folding the company into our own data and analytics culture. The included hundreds of pre-built connectors gave us lots of options, but in the end, we were just too large of a company to rely on the product and needed a big-name player to address our wide-ranging needs. Powerful for its size, but not sized enough to address big businesses.

Incentivized

With a simple user interface and
access to IBM's online instructions, Netezza Performance Server is easy to
operate. It also has built-in contribution facilities, as well as good customer
support, to make the DBA's job easier.

Incentivized

• We had to move out of VectorWise after using the database for 2 years. Hence no positive impacts.

Incentivized

• It allows us to work together simultaneously in the database to query our custom results.
• It requires users to know the object name as it does not pop up in their text editor. Thus, users take more time in writing queries.

Incentivized