Infor Birst vs. Windward Core

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.

Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository. Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.

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• 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

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• Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
• Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
• Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.

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• 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

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Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

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• It is hard to pick out the tags if they are mixed in with a block of text.
• Using report variables in select statements causes the selection list of available fields to not show anything.
• The color themes do not match the office selection and it feels very disconnected.

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.

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.

For the most part, the Windward report designer is intuitive for our users; but there are a few areas where it is less intuitive. In these cases, our users need to search Windwards support wiki site, or even contact their support technicians. This can also be due to the short time we've had Windward and our lack of knowledge.

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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

• Poor turnaround time
• Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
• Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
• Lack of inter team work noticed
• Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time

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Support is something they take pride in. Once an issue is raised, they are quick to respond and provide details on a fix. No complaints on support here.

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.

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.

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We evaluated several other products to integrate with our new software, but Windward Studios was an obvious standout above the majority. Other applications required some level of software development knowledge and experience to create templates and a much steeper learning curve. After consideration of ease of use, as well as a cost-comparison between different products, Windward Studios was the most suitable product to meet our needs.

Incentivized

Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

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

• 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.

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Invited by the Vendor

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

• As a fully integrated solution, the ROI is impacted when a client gets stickier with our solution because they see the benefit of Windward.
• Support has been fantastic for our development team so that as we integrate the solutions we have a clear and clean design.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

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