D&B Connect vs. Infor Birst vs. Informatica Cloud Data Integration

Overall, the program can assist any size company with all credit
reference needs. We have not run into any issues other than the overall
cost of the program and the fact that you have to use additional funds
to seek information on international customers.

Incentivized

Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics are well suited for advanced analytics and business intelligence. It has flexible deployment features and a lot of configuration ability with low code - no coding ability. Ability to ingest data from multiple live data sources. Source data from multiple sources can be segregated into multiple sections based on business criteria. Easily searchable business terms (metadata) across all enterprise analytic content.

We use it a lot for importing data. We transform the incoming data to match the formatting of our CRM. We also match on existing records to avoid creating duplicates. Informatica handles all of this exceptionally well. Our users are system administrators. The tool is not well-suited for users who do not have a technical background

Incentivized

• Searching people who have the intent to buy your services or products.
• It has as very good filter that helps pinpoint your targeted audience.
• It has a large pool of contacts within the company, so helps to reach out to the right person via several connections.
• The data available is fresh and current.

Incentivized

• End-to-end solution, from raw source data, ETL, warehousing and reporting, Birst is able to do everything we need in one package instead of needing to develop and maintain multiple technologies
• Intuitive report development. The drag and drop creation of reports is simple. More complicated queries are easy to generate.
• Very user-friendly and interactive. A lot of nice features are available both for developers and end users to streamline the process of preparing and consuming data
• Rich API which allows us to programmatically interact with Birst

Incentivized

• Data synchronisation
• Data replication
• Data integration

• in my opinion having to split usage between United States and International does not make sense on why this needs to be done....recommend eliminating this
• need for improvement on error resolution....when an error is found the D&B resolution team is EXTREMELY difficult to work with...very clunky and automated when there is a need for personnal interaction

Incentivized

• Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly
• Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data
• Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI

Incentivized

• There is a moderately steep learning curve
• Has some idiosyncrasies
• Can be finicky with date formats

Incentivized

Great tool

Incentivized

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.

For more advanced uses, it's hard to get it functioning properly right out of the box. It definitely takes some fiddling to get the systems up and running, especially if you have multiple streams of data that need to be managed across systems.

Incentivized

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.

There is a learning curve with Informatica. It is not always intuitive to use. It is best suited for technical users such as system administrators

Incentivized

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

Great Support

Incentivized

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.

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.

Very Satisfied

Incentivized

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.

Not at the top, but pretty good compared to others. The price and overall usability of the solution would put it in the top 5 options from what I have used. If D&B can make more updates and improvements, then there is potential to be better in the near future.

Incentivized

Birst was better than Domo for our needs because we could get in and tinker with it. Our impression of Domo was that it had a lot of connectors and ready to go reports, but it made too many assumptions about applications we use. We customize too much to use a "ready to go" solution like that. When we looked at Tableau, we liked its visualization capabilities, but it wasn't going to help us do the extractions, ETL, and warehousing of data. It may have come some distance since then.

Incentivized

It is really easy to comply and understand its features.

slightly on the higher side but worth it.

Incentivized

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

• ROI can be achieved anywhere between 6 to 12 months depending upon your business.
• The product is expensive but the data provided is good to an extent and a big sale can help achieve your ROI.
• The data accuracy sometimes can be bad leading to bad domain reputation.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Really greatest than any other conventional application.