Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.
$30,000
Per 20 Users Per Year
Mediafly Intelligence360
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Mediafly Intelligence360, based on InsightSquared's solution acquired by Mediafly in 2021, is a sales analytics and development platform that also supports demand generation analytics and SaaS reporting. It is designed for providing insights into sales processes, closing rates, pipeline and revenue forecasts, calculating KPIs, and market hiring processes.
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
InsightSquared has been a great tool for quick reference dashboards for the whole organization and teams within the sales org. It presents a standardized individual dashboard for all the reps on the team. It doesn't fare well when trying to deep dive things like campaign and lead source inquiries, as well as activities associated with that opportunity.
Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
The dashboard is amazing: easily customize your view so you can view all the data that is most relevant to you at a glance
Sales metrics: see how you are comparing to your peers, from every possible angle. InsightSquared gathers all the data you need to know, want to know, and didn't even know you wanted!
Predictive statistics and the likelihood of a deal to fail or succeed is quite useful in a sales environment where time efficiency is key. Need to know what deals to focus on? You can see exactly what deals need more TLC, which ones are likely to close, and which ones to stop wasting time on.
I know this is something they have in process, but I would love to be able to customize reports myself. The support team is always super responsive and makes sure that we're taken care of. But, it would be great to just be able to log in and change the small things myself.
I recently downloaded the InsightSquared app to my phone, and I'd like to see more functionality there. Currently. You are only able to see dashboards that have a already been created.
We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
InsightSquared has been hugely beneficial to us, and to me in particular as someone outside of our sales team to gain insight into how our sales team and company is performing and how our overall health is. They offer fantastic customer support and have a great community to assist in your implementation of the product.
I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.
InsightSquared is easy to use overall. Running reports and creating dashboards is quick and easy - drag and drop functionality. All reports have multi-filter options allowing you to drill down into your data. Scorecards for employees help show how quickly a rep can start selling after they join your team. Activity ratios provide insight into what it takes from a KPI standpoint to close a deal.
We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast
When we have an issue that is stopping our business from proceeding, I want answers sooner than later. While Birst does have a published response time for each case level, we always wish it could be quicker. What response improvement could there be with a larger support team? In response to first question: Blackhole of issues - Birst needs to improve upon closing issues that resolution was dependent upon code fixes or enhancements, perhaps someone to add a comment on all case tickets at least every 60 days. Escalation - I always have the ability to electronically or via phone escalate a ticket. I also have my Customer Success Manager through whom I can escalate topics.
InsightSquared has a very responsive team, and always willing to help with reporting needs which are not able to be completed in house. They do offer a professional services team at an additional cost, so if your reporting is very complex, or you have a team that is continuously changing the type of metrics they require as a business, their support team will be an invaluable asset for you.
I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.
Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have a lot of demos with a significant portion of them and reviewed several of the major industry studies as well. We had representatives of both user interests/design and the technical backend on the evaluation process.
The major features we were looking for a product that we could embed inside our own SaaS application, connect to a sharded Postgres database, had multitenancy and allowed for customer generated reports/ self-reporting. Some of the minor "nice to have" features we were looking at was scheduled reports, especially if we could plug it into our own scheduling system (for CAN-SPAM compliance), internationalization, and support.
In the evaluation, Birst hit all of the must-haves and enough of the nice to haves that they made it down to our final two and the trial was the clincher to make it our final choice.
I was not involved in our purchasing of this platform, so comparing it is difficult. This being said, it's most similar to constantly running reports in Salesforce, probably. SFDC offers more flexibility, obviously, but InsightSquared offers better visualization, less report updating, and more features dedicated to making analytics more enjoyable. It's worth the cost of the platform to save your admin time in reporting.
we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
