Entrinsik Informer is a web-based reporting and business intelligence application popular in the higher education vertical market. It helps organizations transform real-time data into actionable information by delivering ad-hoc reporting, data analysis, and interactive dashboards.
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Sigma
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Sigma Computing headquartered in San Francisco provides a suite of data services such as code free data modeling, data search and explorating, and related BI and data visualization services.
It makes creating queries very easy for end users so not only research or technicians can do it. The availability for creating Live reports that are accessible via Excel on the network has given many of our users the ability to get the information they need in a format they can use without needing someone to translate the raw data
Its a great tool to have. The ability to come in the morning and by using the report being able see how the day will go. Seeing the goal and the current inventory and also to be able to adjust as the day goes on. With the report updates the report as changes to the inventory happen live or if any issues arise. being able to see that live and being to react quickly.
Simple user-interface: Informer is relatively easy to learn and end users can begin running reports and creating new reports quickly.
Email "burst" functionality: This feature allows emails to be sent out based on data in the report. So for example, a report could be scheduled that would email all student employment managers listing out the specific employees that report to them that haven't submitted their time sheets. Each manager would only see the rows that correspond to their email address.
Analytics and grouping: Users can quickly drag columns to group and sub-total, and can use the analytics tab to get deeper insights into the data.
There are a lot of reports that we have in Informer that say they have never been run, even though I know they have been run. So that makes it really difficult to determine which reports can be deleted to keep a tidy report list.
The only other complaint I have about Informer is that there doesn't seem to be a properly detailed error code/message when the student information system can't be accessed. For example, I am currently trying to move Informer to its own standalone server and I get an error message saying that our license isn't valid. Informer Support sent a new license, which prompted the same message, and the only explanation they have given me is that Informer can't reach the student information system. I would think that if that were the case, the error message would say that instead of an invalid license.
Viewer level license is quite limited. These users can't download data or even add filters on datasets. Something to keep in mind.
Directly querying the underlying data warehouse will lead to increased usage. Not a big deal on something like Redshift, but your Snowflake consumption will increase, potentially by a lot.
Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.
Sigma has helped us a lot and has become an integral part of our daily workflow. It would be difficult to switch to another platform and have to rebuild the numerous metrics and performance reports that we have already established
From the perspective of the new user and a seasoned user I would say eight would represent both parties. It presents a 'familiar' interface and easy to navigate display. Tagging is quite nice and allows for organization of reports based on those tags. These have to be monitored like anything else to keep them consistent but provides a better than average means of organizing reports.
It has a clean and modern interface. However, it is not completely intuitive. I think it would be better and easier to navigate with more Windows style drop down menus and/or tabls. There is a significant learning curve, but that may be due in part to the technical nature of this type of software tool.
I would have given 10 but no one and no system is perfect. The only issue with support is not the staff nor the response but the support Wiki and support pages in general run very slow at times. I believe this has been addressed by the company but the technical speed of the pages have been an issue.
Support team is helpful in answering questions and providing help with using the UI. There are knowledgeable people within the support team. There are also good online support tools. There are significant community support resources available. There is however lack of a live support. It would be useful to have live phone number or chat to use.
We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.
I have experience with Advizor AnalystX, and it was just awful. It is advertised as an interactive reporting tool, in which you can use your mouse to select and segment constituents by where they live (by clicking on a map), how much they've given to your institution, when they last gave, etc. In practice, their map feature was unusable; it's a static map image (imagine a paper map hung on your wall), rather than draggable and zoomable Google Maps, and it required hours of work to configure one map region. As far as computing constituents' giving statistics, it required way too much back-end work to build simple giving totals.
Sigma is by far the best. It is easiest to learn and easiest to use on a day to day basis. I never have to wait for dashboards to load and it's very easy to understand the variables that are going into my visualizations. Best of all I can manipulate the data within Sigma very easily. In these other platforms data manipulation is difficult or must be done in the data warehouse
We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.
Monitoring health of cloud platform has allowed the company to anticipate issues before they affect customers – Sigma prompted us building a canary monitoring process that provides customer container health.
Customer success has used an activity report to discover customers running runaway processes that they were unaware of, creating an alert to contact the customer and prevent an embarrassing situation.
Customer success uses the activity report to prompt conversations regarding increases or declines in behavior that led to increasing contract limits or addressing churn concerns.
