KNIME

KNIME by sennchi

Predictive Analytics And Machine Learning Solutions

KNIME’s vibrant open source community pays dividends in productivity. KniMe is not a big company, but it has a big community of contributors who continually push the platform forward with capabilities such as bioinformatics and image processing. the KniMe Analytics platform is free to download and use and includes over 1,000 analytical and model building operators. the vendor funds its ongoing operations by offering commercial extensions for team collaboration, such as the KniMe server for sharing workflows, advanced security, and remote execution of model building workflows. Maybe KniMe was smart for not taking gobs of venture funding during the big data rush. it relies on the community for innovation. However, the result is that sometimes its enterprise features lag larger vendors as the community focuses on other areas, such as new analytical methods.

KNIME is based in Zurich, Switzerland. It provides the fully open-source KNIME Analytics Platform, which is used by over 100,000 people worldwide. KNIME offers commercial support and commercial extensions to boost collaboration, security and performance for enterprise deployments.

In the past year, KNIME has introduced cloud versions of its platform for AWS and Microsoft Azure, paid more attention to data quality, expanded its deep-learning features, and converted some of its commercial capabilities to open source. Bolstered by a €20 million investment in 2017, KNIME is accelerating its product development and customer acquisition efforts.

KNIME's platform is used by most industries and in most regions of the world. The vendor demonstrates a deep understanding of the market, a robust product strategy and strength across all use cases. Together, these attributes have solidified its place as a Leader.

STRENGTHS

• **Low TCO: **KNIME's unwavering commitment to the open-source approach enables many users and organizations to minimize their data science software costs without compromising quality. The open-source nature of its data access, methods and techniques makes it a good choice for collective innovation. KNIME's pricing of its commercial offerings aims to make data science affordable. In particular, KNIME enables many nonprofit organizations to undertake data science.

• **Cohesive platform for data scientists of all skills levels: **KNIME provides a single, consistent data science framework. It offers highly rated data access and manipulation capabilities, a breadth of algorithms, and a comprehensive machine-learning toolbox suitable for both beginners and expert data scientists. KNIME's platform integrates with other tools and platforms, such as R, Python, Spark, H2O.ai, Weka, DL4J and Keras. KNIME's contextual help with "what comes next" is more flexible than fixed "wizards." The UI and extensive examples provided with the platform appeal to citizen data scientists.

• **Automation of model creation and deployment: **KNIME Model Process Factory offers automation of model creation and deployment, as well as of the modeling process, as per the Cross Industry Standard Process (CRISP). It also has automated approaches to data quality and feature generation. KNIME can trigger model retraining and supports automated data refresh and synchronization.

CAUTIONS

• **Lack of marketing and sales innovation: **Although KNIME has over 1,000 paying customers, many companies are unaware of it. The vendor has limited sales and marketing resources, and those it has focus on solution engineering and partner programs. This focus helps customers succeed with current tasks, but does not instill new ideas, which are needed in this rapidly changing market.

• **Performance and scalability: **Reference customers reported issues with large-scale deployments and performance on large datasets. A KNIME Server deployment is currently limited to a single host. The KNIME Analytics Platform is designed to "mix and match" resources, but should do a better job of explaining resource recommendations. The outlook for KNIME's performance and scalability is positive, however, thanks to its newer offerings in the cloud.

• **Limited commercial options: **Reference customers want more commercial options to match their specific needs. They also want better security, in-depth training and enterprise-grade platform management capabilities. Despite having one of the widest global customer populations, KNIME lacks truly global services and sometimes provides patchy, although competent, support.