The ibi™ WebFOCUS® product is an enterprise business intelligence and analytics solution equipped with data management, visual discovery, predictive analytics, and visualizations. Combining these capabilities and data science in one unified containerized platform, the WebFOCUS® solution can be used to make data-driven decisions across the enterprise and provide reports, dashboards, and customer-facing applications at scale.
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Noetix
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Noetix is a business intelligence software offering from Noetix.
I would less recommend it because it looks like IBI is receding a bit from the European market. I would not be certain for future support. Knowledge in the market in western Europe is limited Functional wise the application suits almost all situations. I would for sure recommend it purely based on its capabilities
If you desire to 'empower' employees to create or edit their own reports, Noetix is a great tool, though I am not particularly an 'empowerment' person. In my experience most people have enough work of their own, so to tell them they now have to create their own reports can cause problems. If someone is available, like I am, to create the reports based on user requirements, then the report can be shared with the user and they can make changes as needed. I have several users who use the same report over and over for slightly different applications, and they are happy to make the small alterations, but creating whole new reports can seem like a daunting task. I tell my users I don't want them to become frustrated. If they want to try on their own, fine, but don't waste more than half an hour, and if you start to get frustrated, stop and IM me. Ninety-nine times out of 100 I already have a report that will give them exactly what they need. I've done extensive training, and find it's quite easy for users to pick up
One thing that has always been good at WebFOCUS is how they interact with the customer on items. They take suggestions and implement them. In addition technical support is timely and very detailed.
I think they keep up with and lead in implementing new technologies in the BI space. One case of this are the ability for user to create their own easy dashboard using the green plus buttons. Also the ability to link d3 into and have the ability to implement new types of graphs is nice.
I have been to a spoke at one of their user conferences and they are worth going to. In addition to all of the great seminars the interaction you get with vendors and other users is key in the growth of your knowledge. I've learned so much for my time at these conferences.
Noetix makes reporting easy. Users can combine vtables (the Noetix term for its views), add or delete columns, add filters or parameters, sort, add totals to columns, all from an easy to use interface. It comes with a very large number of already written reports for all areas of Oracle reporting, but it also allows for custom vtables to be written, for Oracle or any database, to expand the number of available reports.
Noetix has an Excel add-in that is marvelous. It eliminates the need to run a report in the web application and export to Excel. The add-in can run very large reports, up to a million lines. Once a report is run in Excel, it can be saved, and then refreshed whenever needed. It's a really good tool.
Noetix is flexible. Joins can be added to existing Noetix vtables and also to custom vtables, to give users a large amount of data configurations to choose from. It also allows users to create calculated fields to any report.
Noetix is easy to administer. Users can be added or removed and grouped by the level of permission. Although, in our case, it validates against Oracle, the level of security is dictated by Noetix.
The newest versions of WebFOCUS have an unnecessarily complicated security layout that makes configuration difficult to accomplish without bringing in the vendor for installs.
This software tries to cover too many bases allowing you to switch from writing code manually to creating reports using only GUI tools. This sometimes complicates screens and functionality where the two methods don't always work well together. -though its nice to have the choice.
The sales force is not as top notch as many software companies
I like the fact that the output is standard, but I would like to be able to move columns around on the output screen, rather than having to go back to the editing screen, move the columns, then rerun the report.
Drag and drop of columns would be nice on the edit screen. Currently if you add a column to a report, it automatically goes to the bottom. Relocation of the column has to be done a line at a time. I would prefer to be able to grab the field I want from those available, and drop it into the report where I want it.
When adding a filter (or parameter), the available fields automatically come up in alphabetical order, but on the columns screen, they don't. They come up in the order they actually are in the query. That means, when creating custom vtables, to have the fields in alphabetical order, one must put them that way. It would be nice if Noetix put the fields in alphabetical order for the user.
This software is deeply engrained with my organization and has become a tool that would not easily be replaced without spending more money and resources to get the same results. License cost is comparable to other report writing tools and the capabilities are greater than the competition without having to buy multiple apps to do the same thing.
Best BI tool/product I have used. The others don't compare overall. Some can look fancier, but when you actually use them with large data and data from numerous systems/sources that is where most of the competition falls away. I also don't like downtime. I have basically none for a large user base with WebFocus. Even SAP Crystal Reports went down for 4 days once - 4 days because the admin password got locked out due to a glitch and we had zero reports for 4 days. WebFocus has never had more than a few minutes of downtime. It's like a tank that just keeps rolling. There is no other choice for reliable BI.
They have extremely knowledgeable techs that I have worked with over the years. Some have actually become really good friends of mine. I see them often at local user groups and when we show them how we are using their tools to save millions of dollars throughout the company
Plan ahead on what data will be accessible and the type of security required on the database and if you will want to use security that is built into the software. It is worth consulting with the vendor on what your plan is and how they recommend you proceed in order to get results you are happy with.
Webfocus handles the side of our business that is involved with our catalogs. Our catalogs is a huge revenue driver for us and this tool has been extremely useful with planning feature catalogs. Tableau is used more for marketing and merchandising purchases since we can filter data based on website sales.
I believe Noetix is much easier to use than either Crystal Reports or InfoMaker. When I worked with InfoMaker I used to say it took 5 minutes to get the data and 5 hours (and sometimes days) to make it look good. The same can be true for Crystal Reports. Noetix has a standard format, and most people export to Excel anyway. Who prints reports? So formatting is not all that important.
We are not yet a success story. Though we've been implementing WebFOCUS for over a year, we have very few products in our Production portal. Of course, this is not all the responsibility of Information Builders, but we were ill-advised by our 'training coordinator' in our training of staff and coming up to speed with the tools has been very slow.
Once skilled analysts and professional IT staff achieve a grasp of the products, they are able to very quickly create polished and well-received products.
The DW/BI project has helped us to establish standards and protocols of communication that will allow us to more quickly meet knowledge transfer requirements
