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.
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Vena
Score8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Vena Solutions provides a financial process automation solution to automate Corporate Performance Management, accounting and budgeting, Regulatory & Compliance, and other finance-related processes. It is scaled for medium to large-sized organizations.
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Pricing
Infor Birst
Vena
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
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Complete
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Infor Birst
Vena
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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The Professional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and can be added onto as a company grows. The plan includes: Vena Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal.
Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Vena Insights, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, and Expert Managed Services.
For a limited time, new customers who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Online) as their primary ERP can get a free year of Vena and 40% off implementation costs.
Vena also offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
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.
It is well suited for planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Using its capabilities also allows you to use it for reporting, whether it's month-end reporting or other reporting where you want to rely on data from a source that can be nicely presented and adjusted in Excel.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The Admin function of Vena, being able to set up the users in the user categories and the different groups and assigning the groups and the task bindings, is particularly easy and very helpful because as we have so many different departments and disciplines in our organization, we do need to establish pretty specific user access so this process works really well for us.
Running reports in Vena is fairly easy, and we do enjoy being able to just push a button and get some budget versus actuals.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Have another license between power user and contributor that allows building reports that aren't ad hoc, but don't have all the admin rights of a power user.
Have a session on best in class Workforce Planning prior to implementation.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
Vena has become an integral part of finance and our daily process. Without it we would take longer to prepare results and decisions will be delayed. Vena has given the whole organization more visibility of results and budgets so that all departments participate more actively in managing their budgets rather than it being the sole responsibility of finance.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
Vena is somehow easy to manipulate. If you want to map accounts, or change mapping. there are clear instructions and guidance. and also Vena AI is on the way, so i think we can leverage it more and let AI help us mapping and check errors. overall a very good product and easy to learn and set up.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
Vena is seemingly always available. They plan maintenance windows well in advance and always off hours (typically over a weekend) and communicate clearly throughout maintenance about what will be affected. Over 5 years of using the product, I can only remember one time when the platform was unavailable (I believe due to an underlying server hosting issue from their provider), and they resolved the issue and had everything up and running again within 8 hours.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
The performance is dependent on how much data and calculations are involved and how complex the security settings are. A simple template or report loads in seconds. A complex template or report can take a while. If there are many users with complex security settings, that will be a factor in the load time.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
When I reach out to our support team, they are always able to fix any issues we are having in a timely manner. It is always resolved quickly which proves that customer support always helps out our support team with any issues so they can in turn help us quickly
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
This is the best way to learn and buy-in. The in person effect gives students both a hands on approach but an instruction to be there to customize assistance and understanding. In person also builds greater buy in with your future team on creators. However if your audience is better at on line learning this is another good option.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Previously used Synario for long-term forecasting. Ultimately moved to Vena for this to keep budgeting and forecasting together in a single solution. Vena's system is much easier to learn on the admin side since it is Excel-based so the transition was pretty simple. Previously used Jenzabar with JICS for budgeting. Vena's budget system is more user-friendly for end users and more flexible so it works better for our specific needs. Vena's reporting system is easier to use and customize.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Vena has helped save time by reducing the manual work involved with budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis. Instead of spending as much time organizing data and reconciling spreadsheets, I can focus more on reviewing results and making informed decisions. It has improved collaboration between teams and provided better visibility into financial performance, creating more efficient processes overall.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
