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Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, …
Starting at $30,000 Per 20 Users Per Year
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What is Infor Birst?
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,…
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Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (78)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (77)8.080%
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (72)8.080%
- Formatting capabilities (77)7.070%
Pricing
Basic License
$30,000
On Premise
Per 20 Users Per Year
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://bit.ly/2n6VznO
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Extending Analytics in CloudSuite Distribution - Demo
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Analytics Anytime, Anywhere - Birst Mobile Demo
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Automated Data Refinement in Infor Birst - Demo
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Best Practices For Increasing Adoption of Analytics - Demo
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Infor Birst How-To Series – Connecting to Databases
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What is Infor Birst?
Infor Birst is a BI product that enables a single view of data and eliminate data silos. Additionally, decentralized teams and individual users can augment this shared analytic fabric with their own local data, without compromising data governance. This consistency comes from a unified semantic layer, which maintains common definitions and key metrics, no matter where users sit.
Birst achieves Networked BI through a 2-tier architecture that aligns back-end enterprise data with line-of-business or local, edge data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source (data stores, applications, warehouses, big data, and unstructured external sources) into a unified semantic layer. The result is a consistent view that enables users with self-service analytics through dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.
Birst goes to market in two primary ways:
- Direct, for enterprises using Birst for analytics on internal data to drive improved business outcomes
- Embedded, for all size companies who offer data (analytics) products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products
Birst’s product is packaged in 3 available formats:
- Platform and per-user fee
- By Department or Business Unit
- By end-customer (for embedded scenarios)
Infor Birst Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Windows App
- Supported: Administration via MacOS App
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: In-memory data model
- Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
- Supported: ETL Capability
- Supported: ETL Scheduler
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: ODBC
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: ParAccel
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: SAP
- Supported: Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Predictive Analytics
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Infor Birst Screenshots
Infor Birst Videos
Infor Birst Competitors
Infor Birst Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | All |
| Supported Languages | Arabic, English, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Spanish |
Infor Birst Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Alteryx, InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued), and Datameer are common alternatives for Infor Birst.
Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling and Multi-User Support (named login) highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Infor Birst are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, Accounting, and HR departments rely on Birst to establish a single source of truth and move away from individual definitions of data. Zalora, for example, utilizes Birst as their primary tool for self-service data needs, including data extraction for operational purposes and simple ad-hoc analysis. The fulfillment center employs Birst to track item or product level KPIs, while the marketing teams make use of Birst Live data and dashboards to monitor campaign sales and discounts. Birst integrates with various data sources like Google Analytics, event tracking, operational data, and sales data through a separate data warehouse. By distributing reports and dashboards across the company for viewing, Birst serves as an enterprise-wide BI visualization and distribution platform that supports different revenue models while providing reporting automation, visualization, and distribution capabilities. Furthermore, Birst is embedded into cloud-based software provided to customers, enabling the monitoring of software utilization and tracking of marketing campaigns. Salesforce users benefit from BIRST Dashboards integrated into Salesforce pages as it provides sales analytics and pipeline tracking. The time-to-delivery advantage offered by Birst was one of the reasons it was chosen by many organizations. It allows for simple gathering of company-wide data streams without the need for manual data warehouse construction or report building. With Birst's robust features, it is used across various industries and departments such as SCM & Operations teams, Sales teams, partners, finance, marketing, product management, clinical data analysis in hospitals, education institutions for measuring performance effectiveness and much more. Overall, Birst fulfills a wide range of use cases and enables businesses to analyze data effectively and gain valuable insights to drive informed decision-making throughout the organization.
Highly versatile and user-friendly: Users have found Birst to be a highly versatile and user-friendly business intelligence tool. They appreciate the intuitive user interface, which makes tasks easy to perform. Many reviewers have mentioned that even users with limited technical skills can quickly navigate the platform and start using its features effectively.
Knowledgeable and proactive support: Many users highly value the knowledgeable and proactive support provided by Birst. The support team is responsive and helpful in providing excellent guidance. Reviewers have expressed satisfaction with their interactions with the support team, highlighting their expertise in resolving issues promptly.
Customizable user interface: Users appreciate the customizable user interface of Birst, which allows them to tailor the platform to their changing business needs. The flexibility of the interface is seen as a major advantage by several reviewers who mention being able to personalize dashboards, reports, and visualizations according to their specific requirements.
Confusing User Interface: Users have found the user interface of Birst to be perplexing and not user-friendly. Some reviewers have mentioned that it has a steep learning curve and lacks proper organization and categorization of custom expressions.
Lack of Support from Technical Team: Several users expressed frustration with the lack of support from Birst's technical team. They reported difficulties in reaching them over the phone and dissatisfaction with their insistence on scheduling calls even after submitting detailed tickets.
Difficult Data Modeling Process: Users encountered challenges with data modeling in Birst, especially for those who were new to the platform. The ETL tools were described as inadequate, leading some users to rely on alternative platforms for data warehousing.
Users commonly recommend Birst for its intuitive and effective business intelligence and data analysis capabilities. They attribute Birst as a comprehensive solution with a low total cost of ownership. Additionally, users suggest Birst for its cloud-based central BI solutions, emphasizing their focus on security and scalability. Another frequently mentioned recommendation is Birst's top-notch visualization capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking advanced data visualization tools. Users also find Birst to be highly capable and user-friendly, highlighting its excellent analytics and AI capabilities.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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September 28, 2021
A simple to use and effective business intelligence solution
We use Birst for all analytics and reporting needs across the entire company
- Easy Data Warehouse Modeling
- Rapid Report and Dashboard Development
- Convenient Scheduled Reports
- Fixing various bugs
- Improving support
- Quality of life changes
January 10, 2019
Solid tool with opportunites to become even better.
Birst is our enterprise-wide BI visualization and distribution platform. Our company has 4 different revenue models ranging from big buy advertising, subscription based advertising, affiliate / performance based revenue as well as (digital) product driven revenue. Nearly every department here uses it for something, though it does not yet solve all problems within most departments. Currently we are able to report and distribute sales numbers to individual account executives as well as provide sales management views across as well as revenue and user across our B2C business lines as well. It solves for reporting automation and some visualization as well as distribution.
- For end users, Birst has a friendly UI that allows them to naturally interact with reporting data via web browser.
- For properly modeled data, the visualizer tool makes it easy do build quick visualizations.
- Surfacing data on dashboards with global filters allows users the flexibility to view multiple metrics with the same lens.
- Data modeling is a particular challenge for both novice and experienced data engineers. The ETL tools are insufficient to meet even 1/2 of our needs, and as a result we have a separate platform for data warehousing and use the back end of Birst solely for data exploration projects.
- There are occasionally delays in the UI when applying filters that often lead users to think that something is broken when in fact they just need to wait a few more seconds for the UI to change, even to let them know that it's still updating.
- Customer service, while it has improved, is still poor relative to other vendors that we work with. I often feel that both our CSM and our support technicians are defensive and try to push the responsibility for sub-optimal experiences back on us, and while it sometimes *is* the case that it is an issue on our end, more often it is not and even when it is we shouldn't FEEL like that. None of our other vendors take this approach, and even when the problem is on our end, they support us getting through it in a much less defensive way.
We use Birst in addition to a separate data warehouse to ingest Google Analytics, event tracking, operational and sales data. We build reports that are distributed across the company by giving everyone a Birst account and having them log in to view relevant dashboard.
There are two use cases:
1. The Data warehouse team has modeled the data into a data mart in the data warehouse. In this case we use a Live Access connection to create a report.
2. The data warehouse team has not modeled the data in the data warehouse yet, so the data is ingested with Birst Connect and then transformed with Birst ETL. The data is reloaded through Birst Connect by kicking off automated Windows Task Scheduler.
There are two use cases:
1. The Data warehouse team has modeled the data into a data mart in the data warehouse. In this case we use a Live Access connection to create a report.
2. The data warehouse team has not modeled the data in the data warehouse yet, so the data is ingested with Birst Connect and then transformed with Birst ETL. The data is reloaded through Birst Connect by kicking off automated Windows Task Scheduler.
- Easy to create visualizations
- Very attractive visualizations
- Connect to many data sources
- Terrible documentation and training resources. Sometimes not enough documentation, sometimes it is WRONG! Often we are told to post our issues to the Birst user forum, as if we should be able to figure out our own problems rather than Birst troubleshooting their own product.
- Sometimes when there are bugs we are told they will only be addressed by voting on them as feature requests, not addressing the bugs. Some feature requests are years old.
- When using Birst Connect there is a lot that can go wrong on the Birst side of things completely out of our control, and then we are waiting on technical support to resolve. In particular the space can get "locked" if we try to process while it's already processing. I've also experienced where a staging table was deleted in the user interface, but not the backend of the tool, so it failed until the support team manually removed it.
- Birst technical support is very weak. They often do not answer the phone, and they always ask to go on a call with you after submitting a ticket, no matter if we've provided extensive documentation within the ticket.
- The ETL features are incredibly hard to use, though very powerful. As someone who has an understanding of database theory I found the fact that the training refused to teach to "primary keys" and "foreign keys" and "facts and dimensions" and instead made us learn a whole different terminology of "levels" and "hierarchies" very confusing.
- Processing is entirely mysterious to us. There's little explanation of what is happening when it is processing, which makes it hard to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
- Terrible or non-existent error messages. When a scripted source fails to execute the log in the scripted source doesn't even generate an error message. We've also found that the error message "data format is not correct" doesn't actually mean that, but can mean a whole bunch of other things related to the model.
- Birst does not allow snowflake data structure more than 2 levels deep. This is a problem as our data warehouse is a snowflake, so we always have to flatten our tables.
- Birst sends its users to the user Forum, but half of the issues on there have not been resolved. There's a person whose job it is to reply whether the users have figured out a solution. Why is this our responsibility to figure out their tool?
- Very, very little support for using Live Access to connect to data. Some of the Birst support staff don't even know how to use it.
March 23, 2018
Birst in eLearning Sales and Ops
We use Birst internally to analyze sales and marketing data to improve our marketing efforts (ROI on digital marketing spend) and to provide insights to our eLearning operations team.
Our marketing team analyzes time series of marketing spend vs the revenue received attributable to that spend and adjusts digital campaigns to optimize ROI.
The operations team extract student engagement data from our LMS and identifies students at risk of not completing their coursework in a timely fashion so that they can engage with them to identify issues and assist.
Our marketing team analyzes time series of marketing spend vs the revenue received attributable to that spend and adjusts digital campaigns to optimize ROI.
The operations team extract student engagement data from our LMS and identifies students at risk of not completing their coursework in a timely fashion so that they can engage with them to identify issues and assist.
- Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
- Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.
- The Birst product uses it's own query language (BQL) which we feel has been implemented in different ways in different parts of the product.
- This makes learning the entire product more difficult than it ought to be.
- The Birst idea of grains and hierarchies is hard to get a foothold on. I don't think I completely get it yet.
We have embedded Birst into our SaaS offering to be used by our customers as one of their reporting options. We have embedded it both in minor dashlets on single record pages for a quick view of how records are doing and as a larger dashboard for more details and advanced reports. We also analyze some of our own statistics in Birst.
- Customer adoption and success are important to Birst. They have positions dedicated to our success, worked to making sure we knew how to solve our problems once we were past implementation, and have regular contact even after. Purchasing the TAM program increases that.
- Attractive reports that render quickly.
- Using the cloud offering we have had spaces malfunction, especially if we try to upload data and process them on a frequent basis. They seemed to have fixed this with one of their most recent releases and with us reducing the frequency we upload data (twice a day rather than every hour), but there are still occasional issues.
- Learning curve - Trying to figure out how to do things in a new system that I could do in seconds in SQL is a bit frustrating. The help, community, and our TAM rep helps with this, but it still happens.
March 12, 2018
Friend of Birst
We use it across the organization as a real time monitor of our statics.
- Manages data from multiple sources.
- Variety of choices to display data
- Stable platform
- Customer service and support
- User friendly
- Improve Training
March 09, 2018
Birst: a whole in one reporting platform.
We are using birst in the international part of our logistics company. It is used across different departments. In the beginning it was used for sales and marketing but going forward we also provide information to finance and operations. Information is spread by using dashboards, scheduled reports and ad hoc reports. The information we provide via Birst is about client performance, quality of our service, year over year financial analysis and more.
Our current challenge is to implement a near real time reporting on our service in order to be proactive and to keep the degree of service at a high level.
Our current challenge is to implement a near real time reporting on our service in order to be proactive and to keep the degree of service at a high level.
- It's rather easy to create a datamodel once you understand some basic rules.
- Development can go pretty fast. Defining the input are more or less straightforward SQL queries, actually called BQL. Transforming input to output can be simple and straightforward but also complex problems can be solved.
- The ad hoc report creation in visualizer is very convenient and easy to use. If needed a powerful formula can be created in order to transform existing attributes or measures. The editor to create those formulas has evolved from a basic one to an editor using type-ahead and lookups.
- Dashboard creation is a piece of cake and the use of the dashboard with filtering,drill through and slice and dice is pretty straightforward and intuitive.
- Birst is spending a lot of effort in the frontend and creating a product which will allow more and more self service for the end user. Nothing wrong with that wouldn't it be that in the backend, the admin part, some effort could be used to improve efficiency and usability.
- Using a cloud application is both a good and a bad thing. When problems occur we sometimes wish to get more insight in the blackbox under the hood of Birst, actually the database with the physical tables. Fortunately the cloud solution offers us still more advantages than drawbacks.
- Some powerusers like to get a whole lot of data so they can do some number crunching in their favorite spreadsheet. But Birst doesn't always fit this need as getting big chunks of data out of the system can be pretty inconvenient.
February 21, 2018
Birst debunked.
Birst is being used in multiple departments across the organization. Zalora is an eCommerce company with data touching all the departments. Birst is now primarily used as a data extraction tool for operational purposes, hence it's our primary tool for self-service data needs. Birst is also used by several departments for simple ad-hoc analysis. Birst is primarily used by the fulfillment center to know item or product level KPIs. Birst Live data and dashboards were used for a long time to track marketing campaign sales and discounts. Until recently we shifted to other platforms as we needed more real-time analytics. Traditionally birst sufficed most of the business problems and use cases, however due to the technological transformations we had to pivot our platform to other alternatives.
- Birst is a cloud based BI platform and hence all our data is hosted on the cloud platform. Zalora had lot of data users who used to query the database, all these loads where shifted to birst and helped our in-house databases to function smoothly and concentrate on other critical processes.
- Birst report scheduling functionality has been very useful for our company. reports are scheduled to emails to several operational heads to help them monitor action items and help to improve our operational KPIs.
- Birst has been flexible with the number of users who can access the tool. Most of the BI platforms currently charges companies based on the users who would use the BI tool.
- Birst is useful in performing time based KPIs such as YoY, WoW, MoM, Qtr-o-Qtr etc. There are several functions available which helps to perform time based calculation.
- Birst is very useful in performing aggregations at different level (and different dates) as its based on star schema.
- As all the reports are in cloud, birst reports can be easily shared with one another and acts as a report repository
- Birst helps to maintain single source of truth and helps enforce standardized definitions for all our KPIs
- Visualizer report rendering is of high quality and quite fast for simple data requests and pull
- Birst provides snapshot functionality which is extensively used in our company to maintain the price logs and changes of all our merchandise.
- Birst being a cloud based platform is a both a blessing and a curse. as the data scales the performance of the tool deteriorates. although simple KPI reports can be quickly obtained, load intensive functions such as STAT or LET becomes hard to perform.
- The customer service is rather poor when the problems at hand are tough. The turnaround time for some of the bigger problems can go on for months without an alternative solution
- The processing time for each space is not consistent. outside US servers the processing time is very time consuming. Our APAC spaces in birst gets updated data by afternoon of a working day.
- The scheduled reports might not come in time if the server is busy. We have had instance in which the scheduled reports would come a whole 24 hours later than the scheduled time.
- Birst is a very difficult setup for change. If the data in the company is changing constantly then birst is not the tool to be held with. after implementing best practices, we were able to bring down the processing time of birst live to max 25 mins.
- When the size of the data scales, powerful functions such as STAT (bring data at a different level and aggregates in the report) and LET are hard to perform. We have had instance in which STAT would run for more than an hour to render reports
- Birst designer are still in FLASH and the vizualiser which is in HTML5 lacks several critical functions like scheduling, notifications, saving expressions and managing them. this leaves the customer to use the designer module instead of the vizualiser module, however the support for designer has been removed without keeping in mind that the visualizer component is incomplete.
- Plug n play analytics is hard to perform unless you have certain technical knowledge. Data in flat files or excel files cannot be analyzed or visualized instantly like it can be done in Tableau or any other BI Platform.
- External Inputs cannot be made on the report. External parameters and data cannot be blended with the existing report. For example, if we had to increase our discounts by x% how much would our sales be? these kind of questions are hard to perform.
- The syntax of each module in birst is different. This shows lack of team work within birst. for example. In designer module the ubiquitous if statement is denoted by IF and in Admin it is denoted by IIF. this would lead to end user being confused.
- Certain important critical functions such as Report bursting, querying sample data and parameterized reporting are available only to the admins and not the end users.
- Most of the code change requests in customer service tickets are still pending to date and some of them are unresolved.
- Birst has quite a bit of learning curve as it has its own syntax. one would need to be educated to understand the different types of expressions which exist in birst.
- Birst lacks search functionality in designer and searching in visualizer is rather tedious if you have several KPI named similarly
- The Pivot Control functionality is rather poor and pathetically mimics the pivot of excel
- Advance analytics is not possible. Different statistical models cannot be implemented. this would require data to be pumped out to perform advance analytics
- The Tableau-Birst connect is limited to 500GB, hence if the data scales the ODBC connector would not be useful
- The Data logs thrown out by birst needs to be more intutive and detailed. this would help new users to better understand the problems and troubleshoot it effectively
- Usage tracking of birst is tedious which would require a separate space to be created just to track users.
- Renewal costs are expensive given the price per BI Platform is coming down in recent years with more and more products coming online.
February 15, 2018
Birst Forward
Birst is currently used in four departments across our business and is being rolled out to all areas of the business over the coming months. Birst is an extremely effective tool for us to monitor and manage our stock turn and profitability, allowing us to drill down into any potential problem areas and resolve quickly and efficiently. It allows us to quickly visualise our current and historic stock and profit.
- Birst allows a wide range of users to quickly and easily see the information relating to their area of the business.
- The Birst app is very useful for our employees who do not always have access to their PC.
- Overall once a dashboard has been created, it is simple to filter and drill down into more detail for users who require more than the top line KVI.
- Reports set up in a crosstab or table are not very visual to look at, but I often find some reporting requirements cannot be displayed in a chart.
- I personally have found writing some of the custom expressions I require quite difficult to write, but the Birst community has been helpful.
February 28, 2017
Nerd Crush.
Right now we are using Birst to integrate our Salesforce.com instance with sales data from multiple ERP systems into a singular data model housed in Birst. The use is mostly sales right now, but other departments also use the data within Birst for their needs. A major need for the company was being able to compare forecast and budget data that is entered into salesforce with actual revenue invoiced in the ERP systems. Creating a link between a Salesforce account and being able to track that all the way down to revenue generating customer is a big deal for us. Eventually we will be rolling out Birst solutions for all facets of the company including supply chain, quality, finance and operations.
- The way Birst simplifies and integrates the ETL with the creation of the star schema is the biggest strength in my opinion. I didn't find any competition that was even close.
- The all-in-one cloud solution is a huge plus as well. Because they have the back end and front end in one solution they have a huge incentive to see that the customer's projects succeed. The overhead for managing multiple products or disaster recovery for a data warehouse has the potential to be a huge headache.
- The pre-built Salesforce.com connection/ETL/DataModel was another big deal for us. This probably took 6 months off of our timeline. Also, being able to look at the code for how they did it continues to be a boon to my learning curve.
- The user interface for the administration and development could use a face-lift. Although I believe this is happening very soon.
- As a small implementation we've had some issues finding a suitable outside partner for consultation.
July 06, 2016
1 year of Birst
Birst has been used in Catho as the main access to data, across all the organization. There is a small resistance to change in the internal report but we in the strategic department are trying change that mindset. I see two big problems:
First, the learning curve for a new developer is quite long. There are some paradigms that make Birst a little hard to learn. It’s a very bureaucratic tool.
Second, Catho is a Brazilian enterprise and we use the cloud storage from Birst. But the upload time and the process time is really long.
- The Visualizer, is really easy for the end user
- The creation of Virtual Cubes
- The Data enrichment and cleaning
- Long learning curve, an uncommon paradigm
- Long time to process many lines of data (10kk) data
- Usability needs to get better
November 12, 2014
A Great Product with Even Better Customer Service
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Report building is quick and easy.
- Creating a data model for a reporting structure and data warehouse is easy.
- Our users can access it whenever they want, whenever they want using either a computer or iPad.
- Birst seems like it can do almost anything either myself or the users can think of. When my users ask me for things I don't know how to do, I typically just say "sure", assuming that it's possible and that I'll figure it out. I'm sure this will come back to bite me one of these days, but it hasn't yet.
- There were a number of "quality of life" issues, I'll call them, when we first got started on the Appliance version - for example, upgrading was very clunky. Those issues have been cleaned up and I have no complaints about them now. Birst seems to do a really good job of listening to their customers and giving them what they want.
- The Birst Mobile iPad app doesn't have the full functionality of the browser-based version, but I understand that this is being fixed with HTML 5. In fact it may already be fixed - I know that some of the HTML 5 implementation is done, but I'm waiting for it to be fully in place before making the switch.
February 25, 2014
First product ever purchased where promise was fully delivered.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
across a division within a larger organization. External clients also utilize interactive dashboards and visualizations. We utilize Birst to present internal administrative and service metrics, external reach and effectiveness metrics and comparative metrics across our large syndication network.
- Birst is best at implementing and validating data warehouse models. I have been able to prototype multiple models in under 4 hours of effort - this is really amazing. As a past user of a big-3 reporting stack, these same tasks would have taken days. It is also extremely easy to publish dashboard of reports for users to view and interact with.
- Birst supports both our internal analytics needs related to usage as well as external partner metrics utilized by our customers to determine efficiency of our products within their websites.
- Birst's interface can be slow at times. On dashboards, I regularly see 3-5 second load times BEFORE the data begins being loaded (interface load time for the Adobe Flex framework). In addition, I have had numerous occurrences where I have to back out of the report designer and come back in due to failed refresh of the design palette.
November 29, 2013
Fantastic BI Solution
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Very sleek, easy-to-use interface
- Can quickly upload all of my data and start making discoveries right away
- Knowledgeable support is always available
- Was hoping for a slightly flatter learning curve
- Would be nice to be able to operate more independently from customer support by providing further embedded help options and documentation.
August 30, 2013
Great Product with Great Support
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- It combines data from disparate data systems so that it can all be viewed in one place
- The drilling and filtering capabilities are outstanding! We've really been able to get to the lower level of detail that we needed, but could not get, before we started using Birst.
- Once created, Birst updates all by itself. No downloading, exporting, or re-aggregating of data to update reports.
- Report designer user interface is poor. For example, Birst has a feature that allows report designers to build and save custom expressions. This is helpful because, rather than having to rewrite the expression each time it's needed, the designer can simply select it from the saved expression box and drop it into the report. However, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the organization of the expression box. It's not alphabetized and you can't categorize expressions by creating folders. This can lead to frustration when time is wasted just trying to find the custom expression that you need.
- Creating new reports is a clumsy process.
- Data exports are sloppy. This is due more to the lack of flexibility in the designer UI than to the actual exporting capability. For example, when creating a data table, you often need the label to be a larger size than the column because the label requires descriptive text while the column is just a value. However, in the Birst designer UI, you cannot independently change the size of a measure label and the size of its corresponding column--they have to be the same size.