Likelihood to Recommend IBI (Information Builders)
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
Read full review Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
Read full review Pros IBI (Information Builders)
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. Read full review It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function. Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live! Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server Read full review Cons IBI (Information Builders)
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 Read full review Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with Read full review Likelihood to Renew IBI (Information Builders)
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.
Read full review It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
Read full review Usability IBI (Information Builders)
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.
David Maillie Application Development Analyst and Software Engineer
Read full review Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
Read full review Reliability and Availability IBI (Information Builders)
Tracking availability formally for almost two years and we are at 99.8%
Read full review Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
Read full review Performance IBI (Information Builders)
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
Read full review Support Rating IBI (Information Builders)
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
David Maillie Application Development Analyst and Software Engineer
Read full review We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
Read full review In-Person Training IBI (Information Builders)
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
Read full review Online Training IBI (Information Builders)
It's hit and miss, the last class was overcrowded and people were having trouble connecting which took up much of the time. Instructors vary
Read full review The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
Read full review Implementation Rating IBI (Information Builders)
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.
Read full review Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
Read full review Alternatives Considered IBI (Information Builders)
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.
Read full review Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Read full review Return on Investment IBI (Information Builders)
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 Read full review Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it. There are some significant setup for the server product. Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome. Read full review ScreenShots Tableau Server Screenshots