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Dirty Truths Your Analytics Software Vendor Won't Tell You

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When I speak about analytics, the topic of software comes up early and often. IT pros pump me for hints on getting the lowest software prices. Students bombard me with questions about my software choices. And my fellow practitioners love to tell me all about their favorite software and how it is much, much better than any other software.

Yecch.

While software is a necessary part of the analytics process, it’s less critical than many people make it out to be.  Hundreds of analytics software products are available, and the products have a lot of similarities.

You own thought processes – the effort you put in to understand the business problem, investigate the data available, and plan a methodical approach to analysis – can do much more to simplify your work and maximize your chance for success than any product could. So why the obsession with software?

Part of it is the power of marketing. The constant stream of ads and email keeps those product names in constant view. And then there are the groupies. Technical people just love to show off their tech macho. They can’t get together without arguing about the power of their code, speed of their response or the size of their clusters.

The size of their clusters. Yecch.

So, where do people turn for information to sort out their software confusion? Often, they go right to the same vendors who create the confusion in the first place.

On one hand, that’s not always as crazy as it sounds. Every vendor has experts who can answer complex questions and provide information about that company’s products. These include some of the best brains in the industry, and you can benefit from their help. But on the other hand, nobody should ever make vendors their sole source of information about software, let alone analytics in general. You’ve got to think independently and plan your own course in analytics based on a wide range of information sources.

When you talk to software vendors, keep these dirty truths in mind:

  • The software company representative is not an analytics expert. Most have never done any hands-on analytics.
  • Even the technical experts are not expert about competing products. Most don’t even have access to current versions of those products. The knowledge may be out of date, incomplete or simply incorrect.
  • Vendors have a job to do, and that job is selling software (and maybe services). That’s not an evil thing, but it may not align with your best interests.

If the software that interests you is open source, you may be thinking this doesn’t apply to you. Don’t believe it. You may still end up in contact with the software’s developers, or its fans, looking for information, and you’ll still be responsible for differentiating their point of view from yours.

So, go ahead, talk software. Just proceed with caution.

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