Aprimo vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

I think Aprimo is well suited when you are looking for a DAM to house all of your content. It will be easy to find what you need based on the metadata you are including. I think Aprimo works very well in situations where you are looking for both a DAM and project management system. We are using the DAM and Aprimo productivity and they pair well together

Incentivized

Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.

• Audit - The trail of what you can look back on is so robust and the IDs are on every task and asset. You see a full picture of something that has been approved and can see any amends that have been made. Having the full view and timeline of any updates is essential for our teams.
• Reporting - Most if not all fields can be reported on. This is essential for us as we use reports to influence management decisions as well as managing day-to-day operations.
• DAM - The DAM functionality and connectivity is a big one for our future plans as well as existing ones. Connectors into the DAM help us integrate the systems we have already, plus plan and support the business with new plans in growing areas.
• Service - Aprimo support is amazing. The support we get as a company is always great, no matter how big or small any issues or queries are. The team at Aprimo is always so attentive and comes back with great answers and support.

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Customer support is slow to resolve system issues
• Complicated configuration with no in-depth training amounts to a huge learning curve and expensive concierge services
• The consumer-facing UI does not have all of the functionality that is required
• Training videos are out of date or purport functionality that does not exist

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

While Aprimo provides the fundamental tools to track our actual spend, it has a major void when trying to plan for future programs. Our teams often have offline Excel spreadsheets to track actuals spend vs. our original budget, and lay out the future programs against which we plan to use budget funds. Would also appreciate reporting mechanisms which could splice data in non table format. For example, we often use marketing calendars to display programs/spend over time. This helps our team ensure that programs which are intended to run concurrent with in-store sales executions are happening in the correct time frame. The visual is simply easier to follow.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

Really good search and upload process, and great functionality for workflow approval and editing. QuickConnect is handy for on the go, and the SSO keeps it simple. For customization, it is relatively complex and requires some technical knowledge. The user guides are very detailed, and the Aprimo Academy training modules provide lots of information, but there is a steep learning curve to get fully up to scratch with the system. The level of inter-relatedness of areas of customization could be complicated to work out if there is a problem. The support team at Aprimo is fantastic and the high customization potential is a benefit rather than a downside. A system champion is required to make sure it is fully utilized.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

We have not yet experienced any downtime

The product has been reliable.

We are struggling with it though I think it’s our firewall i.e. an internal issue. Accessing the software outside or on mobile is faster.

They have a multi-tenant and single tenant option (more expensive) . We bought the single tenant option in anticipation of using Campaign Management and based upon our scale. You get more capabilities with single tenant

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

Support is support, so mainly reactive when it is about product inside and common issues. But when it is about specific enhancements and business concerns related to our own configuration and settings, we surely feel a gap. and this is why concierge is a must have solution when facing Aprimo support

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

Aprimo offered a number of hands on sessions customized for each group. As such, they address specific needs and configurations of each team. These sessions also offered another round of cross-functional collaboration in process design.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

It was very generic and we took it prior to configuration. It was however adequate to educate our user in the basic capabilities that will have become available to them after deployment.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We were very well supported. TopRight who performed the process/requirements definition as well as project management functions came with ample experience with various marketing automation platforms. They also came with very good multi-channel marketing experience that allowed them to tackle this implementation as a marketing deployment and not a technology deployment. TopRight bring expertise in multi-channels strategy.

Aprimo performed the configuration and training functions. Their personnel were very well versed in their platform and brought much empathy to a deployment that required a great deal of change management.

I am stunned by how many people (from for-profit sector who work here) have not been exposed to these types of platforms. I want to make sure that folks are so accustomed to user interface. When I roll-out campaign management, teaching them the art and science of campaign management versus just learning the tool. TopRight are marketers. They are familiar with all these technologies. Their job has been to define processes, best practices and turn into training. Similar to training from Salesforce.com about funnel mgmt etc, vs. just the product. We will create training modules that are agnostic to the platform

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

Unica - Both platforms (i.e. Unica and Aprimo) delivered comparable capabilities. However, due to internal limitations around technical support and technical maturity of the organization we selected Aprimo as it delivered the more user friendly user interface. Unica requires more technical saviness. With Aprimo you can be completely non-technical.

We evaluated Epsilon, but they were too expensive and don’t compete on price.

We evaluated Axciom. They offered an outsourced full service and were very powerful, but we wanted to bring capabilities more in-house. The capabilities were more advanced that we needed today. We felt Aprimo or Unica could both carry us a long way.

We did not look at marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo. From a scale standpoint, we were looking for campaign management and not just marketing automation. Also wanted MRM (Marketing Resource Management) or internal workflow management capabilities. We did not take a deep dive as they didn’t have the full suite solution

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

• The stream-lined content process with agency partners who have access to our Aprimo client.
• In app creative review and redlining makes changes easy for client and agency.
• Cost saving in the way that we were able to build custom products and not try and use a costly less effective tool.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized