What is our primary use case?
My usual use cases for Dataiku are mostly data science use cases, or model creation and training.
What is most valuable?
The best features of Dataiku that I think are most important for me include the ETL, the Python, processing, database, and API services.
These features are so valuable to me because all these features are available in one place, which helps me create a solution quickly rather than having a couple of technologies together and integrating them.
I have used Dataiku's AutoML tools, and they definitely shorten the process; they have a lot of built-in intelligence which we can use, and they help to automate a lot of things.
Dataiku enhances collaboration within my team because it is one single tool; all the projects are in one place. People can share each other's workbooks and reusable codes.
What needs improvement?
I think Dataiku could be improved or enhanced in future releases with more 'talk to my data' capabilities, maybe more NLP features, and maybe a platform to build agents.
These improvements would benefit me and my processes because they will help us to continue using Dataiku as one platform; right now we are exploring other platforms for the features which are missing, and if they are available within the same platform, I think it will increase the usage of Dataiku further.
I think the pricing and licensing of Dataiku is a bit expensive; it could be improved further, and I think they should have a different kind of licensing model as well.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Dataiku for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
As for stability and reliability, so far so good; after the installation, I really had no problems. Dataiku works very well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Dataiku is quite scalable, as long as I can pay for more licenses, there is no technical limitation.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the technical support from Dataiku around seven.
I would like them to improve something about the support because it was just our experience that we were complaining about a few things which were not working, and it took a very long time for them to acknowledge that it was not working. It was back and forth, trying this and trying that, and so on. They should not take the complaints so lightly.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before working with Dataiku, I did not use a different solution for the same use cases; we were doing many things ad hoc, writing notebooks, putting it on, and deploying it to the server ourselves and so on.
How was the initial setup?
The challenges I faced were a lot of technical challenges; there is generally a guide on how to set up and install and configure, and we were following those guides, but we were not able to do it ourselves. When we purchased the licenses, we believed that we could do it ourselves and that it would be a straightforward installation, but then we had to extend the contract with Dataiku to get their experts in order to set up everything. The challenges were mostly that things were not running, there were a lot of technical exceptions, and there was a lot of correlation between the server's version and Dataiku's version. They also had to fix a couple of things on their side because things were not working.
What about the implementation team?
I participated in the initial setup and deployment of Dataiku, and the process was somewhere in the middle; it was not as straightforward as we thought it would be. We had team members who had worked on it before, but we still had to get experts from Dataiku in order to help us, and it took a bit longer than expected.
What was our ROI?
I consider the return on investment with Dataiku valuable because for us, it is one single platform where all our data scientists come together and work on any model building, so it is collaboration, plus having everything in one place, organized, having proper project management, and then built-in capabilities which help to facilitate model building.
Other than time efficiency and everything being in one place, the other return on investment I observed with Dataiku is that these are the major aspects; if I have to think about taking out Dataiku and putting my own tools and practices in place, it will be a lot of work to build everything together. These for me are the main things.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Dataiku, I evaluated other options, specifically Databricks, Dataiku, and our vanilla solutions with Azure and AWS.
The reason I chose Dataiku is that we had team members who had used Dataiku before, which gave us more confidence that we would be successful.
What other advice do I have?
Within the last twelve months, I'm mostly working with Snowflake and Dataiku.
I'm a customer of this solution. I don't know where I purchased Dataiku from.
Dataiku's data source integration flexibility has not benefited my data projects much because we are using our own tools for that.
The valuable insights I have derived from using Dataiku's machine learning capabilities include the fact that we are building our own proprietary model, and Dataiku's machine learning capabilities help us to build those models and create insights. It's very proprietary and we have not used any out-of-the-box insights that are available, but the whole Dataiku application helps to speed up the process.
Dataiku's governance and security controls have helped to maintain data privacy. All those features we are using, and again, this is all part of the applications.
Before Dataiku's implementation, all of this used to be thought of separately and implemented using some tools or technologies, but with Dataiku, all of this comes together in one platform. Once my data is in Dataiku, I know that I can put in security, I can integrate it with my IAM and everything, so I don't have to think of all these features independently. Dataiku provides everything in one platform.
I rate this solution an eight overall.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises