A simple to use and effective business intelligence solution
We use Birst for all analytics and reporting needs across the entire company
Infor Birst
Infor Birst
Infor Birst
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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Top Rated
2018
Popular Features
View all 20 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%
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Pricing
View all pricingBasic 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
Features
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
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
- Alteryx
- InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)
- Datameer
- Entrinsik Informer
- GoodData
- IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson
- Mediafly Intelligence360
- TIBCO Jaspersoft
- Knowledge360 from Cipher
- Tableau Desktop
- Tableau Public
- Tableau Server
- Chartio (discontinued)
- SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
- Zoho Analytics
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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January 09, 2019
Birst almost live access
Birst is used as a delivery mechanism to display data to our client. We collect data on mobile device usage patterns, as well as analyst forecasts across many technology areas, and use Birst to visualise this data via dashboards that clients access from our website.
- Connects directly to many types of external data sources, enabling us to plug into data where it already exists
- Visualiser provides a user friendly interface for non-tech users to build their own databases
- HTML dashboards look far better now than the original Flash versions
- Connectivity between the live sources frequently drops and does not reconnect automatically
- Cannot add dynamic titles to reports - so although can create a dynamic text box, this title cannot be exported along with the report
- Designer runs query as soon as an attribute is dropped on screen - would be useful if you know you need to add another 4, to be able to disable the query execution until all items have been added
- sql analysis services, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau Desktop
Birst is not as intuitive or flexible for cube design and aggregations as using SQL Analysis services - at times seems an odd mix between gui based, and required specific code.
Power BI is the tool of choice internally, but is limited by security settings that we need to enable to suport client access.
Tableau is unfortunately beyond our budget to provide the solution we would like to deliver.
Power BI is the tool of choice internally, but is limited by security settings that we need to enable to suport client access.
Tableau is unfortunately beyond our budget to provide the solution we would like to deliver.
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
23.333333333333336%
2.3
35%
3.5
15%
1.5
36.666666666666664%
3.7
73.33333333333333%
7.3
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
5
Internal data analysis, and dashboard design for client facing dashboards
2
Birst requires a lot of patience to use well.
Benefits from input by BI designers, and data modellers / designers
Benefits from input by BI designers, and data modellers / designers
- Visualisation of data analysis
- Presentation of data in visual format for clients, delivered via internet
- Analysis tool for data held in SQL Analysis Services
- Live access connections to SQL Analysis services cubes in MDX and Tabular format
- using prompts to enable custom searches of data
- Basic dashboarding of KPI's
- Client facing data access
Yes
Excel_Reports, as way of publishing data to website for clients
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Birst was the best value product in the market place at the time, for the functionality we believed we needed
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Processes are in place for changes to Birst - the main one being the regression testing required across multiple appliance servers in dev / UAT / live whenever a new Birst patch is released
- VM that is provided is restricted to Windows 2008 - no support for 2012 or higher
- Cannot integrate with our own host providers as there is no real "install"
- Permissions didn't seem to integrate with our AD
- Self-taught
Product is not intuitive, and frequently seems to require clicking back to different pages just to get the product to save recent changes. Support desk are not familiar with using the "Live Connect" method to connect to external data sources, and are more comfortable using the native datawarehouse system, meaning there are times it feels we are the ones telling the support team how to do things.
we have learnt that the memory on the appliance server is the crucial specification to address when configuring Birst
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
All we have done is add some corporate branding and images to
No - we have not done any custom code
We are looking to configure load balancing across multiple appliance servers via NLB but have not yet implement this
Yes
Multiple bugs are raised with the support desk, many they either deny initially or admit were introduced by the frequent updates. Difficult to keep track of what may be errors caused by us, compared to what has been introduced by the software, which makes regression testing every Birst service pack a real chore
The only time we have felt valued has been at the "Birst Forward" conference in SFO, when we were given the opportunity to meet with more senior development team members who actually seemed to understand our issues. Prior to that, the only exception support has come when issues have been escalated to a level that resulted in staff on the West coast agreeing to phone calls at 5am their time to overlap with the UK
- Creating dynamic charts
- Click through functionality
- changing page layouts
- re-sizing charts
- dynamic text
- changing data connections
- working with external data sources via live connection
- SQL SSAS
- Corporate website
Linking to SQL SSAS initially was easy, but it was very unclear how subsequent changes in structure could be reflected.
Integrating via our website simply required permissions and SSO tokens from users
Integrating via our website simply required permissions and SSO tokens from users
- none planned
- File import/export
- ETL tools
-
Number of appliances, and ongoing license fees
Identify what support / user focus groups are available for the people who will actually be using the software
Yes
Birst frequently bring out new versions. While the down time is minimal while upgrading, there are nearly always unexpected impacts in each release affecting existing functionality. This has often led to support tickets being raised due issues where features that were working previously have stopped, but whether that was due to an error at our end or from the latest update is usually a chore to determine
- Better stability of the Live Access connection
- unknown
No
No
Additional products, considerations and use cases would be considered if we were evaluating today.
At the time it was only a couple of people who chose the product based on one of their specific requirements, and other users / products were then crow-barred into that solution.
At the time it was only a couple of people who chose the product based on one of their specific requirements, and other users / products were then crow-barred into that solution.
November 12, 2014
A Great Product with Even Better Customer Service
- 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.
It came down to QlikView, Tableau, Cognos, and Birst. QlikView and Tableau were eliminated because they are simply reporting tools, and it was eventually determined that we wanted to set up a data warehouse. Birst beat Cognos because it had nicer looking reports, was much easier to use, and was *much* cheaper.
20
The end users are predominately Executives, Managers, and Team Leaders. I'm the only person who maintains Birst, writes the reports, etc.
1
I'm the Birst guy. I take care of the back end stuff, build/modify the data model, create reports, build dashboards, make sure it has plenty of food and water, etc.
Only having one person to do all of this is probably wouldn't work for larger companies with a bunch of different databases, but it works great for a smaller company like ours with only one database that we have tying into Birst.
Only having one person to do all of this is probably wouldn't work for larger companies with a bunch of different databases, but it works great for a smaller company like ours with only one database that we have tying into Birst.
- Managing reports is so much easier now. The time it takes me to put out our scheduled reports is basically zero now, and they all have visualization, which was too much work to do on every report before.
- Ad hoc reporting has become much easier as well. Often times when I've made ad hocs in the past, I get asked to make them again with different date ranges, etc., either right then or a few weeks/months later. With Birst, users can select their own data ranges and chart types for the reports I build them, as well as bring in additional metrics or swap out existing metrics. Without going into too much detail, users can do this in a way where the changes are temporary and only visible to them, or by changing the report itself, depending on the permissions you want to give users. The point is that unlike before, I typically only have to do a report once and the users are empowered to make whatever minor changes to it they want, saving me time and getting them their results faster.
- Birst makes data warehousing easy. I don't have any sort of previous training or experience when it comes to data warehouses. After a few conversations with Birst tech support and a couple classes they offer, I'm building out a data warehouse by myself, and it's going fairly well. Our Customer Success Manager is also great about getting me the help I need when I run into issues I can't figure out.
- For a company with less than 100 people like ours, having one person able to totally manage the data warehouse and reporting, and still have time for other things is huge.
Birst is our first reporting and data warehousing tool. Prior to Birst, our reports were Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, populated by data from SSRS reports. We did not have a data warehouse prior to Birst.
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
The professional services company used was Cervello.
- In-person training
- Self-taught
A big mistake we made in our initial implementation was not getting me any training on it. The product is intuitive and I did figure out a great deal on my own, but there's really no substitute for formal training with these sorts of things. As I've said before, I have no experience in this area, so maybe somebody used to this sort of thing wouldn't need the training as much as I did, but even then I would recommend getting the training anyway. Being able to network with other customers and various Birst employees is enough to justify the cost, let alone what you'll actually learn.
No
I don't believe they have different tiers of support.
- We'd eventually like to plug it into Google Analytics.
Yes, Birst has a special connector for Google Analytics.
February 25, 2014
First product ever purchased where promise was fully delivered.
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.
Business Objects, Microsoft, Pentaho, JasperReports, GoodData.
Birst provided the broadest set of functionality at the best cost of ownership. Ease of implementation and getting quickly up to speed provided the biggest cost savings vs the other packages. The keys to ease of use and speed were the integrated nature of the Birst Cloud platform; ETL, Authoring, Visualization and secured self-service. No servers to buy, no complex contracts for Professional services + support + licensing. Birst was very easy to work with in getting started up.
25
Product Management, Sales Operations, Client Solutions, Customer Service. We also have over 2500 external clients access Birst Dashboards integrated into our Client and Vendor Portals to gain insight into their content syndication effectiveness and reach.
5
Engineers and Client Solutions specialists. With a strong understanding of traditional data modeling and stewardship as well as the uses and methods of big data analysis, our core team of Analytics Engineers create and publish interactive analyses utilizing Birst. A good understanding of traditional ETL, BI and visualization design are critical to success of the team.
- Reporting and Analytics
- Interactive Dashboards integrated within our applications
- Publishing Interactive Analyses for consumption by our client base.
- I am not sure if we have been that innovative vis a vis capabilities of a BI/Analytics package. I think we do some pretty amazing things joining big data sets to our standard BI model. We allow comparison of a particular manufacturers product reach vs an anonymized set of competitive information. In an interactive dashboard you can change the comparison from the general set to a named set of top competitors as well as filter and slice by many different attributes.
- We are looking into Birst's predictive analytics capabilities and sampling structures to provide prescriptive services to our syndication network. Items like suggesting the best price for an item, or inventory demand planning, or which channel to spend marketing $. Basically utilizing our data and Birsts platform to create an e-commerce optimization info-store.
- Utilizing the new Birst Visualizer, we will be opening up a limited set of our standard model for ad-hoc visualization (we have a large amount of data and need to limit the scope of what can be completed ad-hoc to live within very strict performance guidelines).
Microstrategy and TerraData
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
As with many, price and licensing became the most important. Not having to buy a license for every person who will look and interact with a dashboard was critical for us as we have an unknown and ever-growing number of users
I would definitely expand the data set with which I evaluated. Although Birst has been able to handle the increased data load - it has taken more work on our side to model, clean, archive and optimize our data. Our original implementation was under budget, but ongoing costs are above what I planned (although not by any economically meaningful amount)
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
I partnered with Birst to implement the system and our first report model.
Yes
the original phase (modeling) really occurred during the selection process. So we really had Model, Implement, Operate and Iterate phases. The last two are of course permanent processes and not actually part of a project plan per se.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation
Changes to technical processes were no problem, but changing mindsets to a position of analysis vs reporting was a big deal - and is still ongoing. Asking for a 200 page report when all you are really looking for are the top and bottom 10 performers requires explaining goals. Making changes to a report that multiple people use, to maximize reuse is a different challenge than in the regular software engineering world with a single codebase. Minimizing code fracturing requires a lot of planning to ensure modifications do not break only code/reports, but purpose and unknown insights as well (unknown to the developer, but well known to the end user)
- esoteric functions that were not well documented - having to go to Birsts client solutions team for answers
- report functions that were not well documented, leading to some unanticipated results in reports - having to go to support to gain understanding of why.
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
BI is a complex topic. If you have experience with BI and data warehousing, this product is very easy to pick up and get going with. From scratch, and with only a couple hours of assistance I was able to pilot the system with a fairly complex data model. This included developing reports that utilized advanced functions that were fairly well explained in online training and documentation.
I would not recommend this approach to someone attempting to implement a full line BI system for multiple end users. Its one thing to work through learning a new system when you are the project champion, quite another when you are trying to implement for a broader user base.
when you create your model - ensure you utilize "scripted" sources for any source that will be utilized in a fact table or degenerated dimension. These become more difficult to modify if you source directly from a file/db connection.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
general interface is easy to customize. There are a couple of options I would like to be configurable that are not, but no real ramifications of these.
No - the product does not support adding custom code
No
Yes
almost always - with exceptions for some complex issues that required engineering. Those may take a couple months.
after an upgrade, where I failed to follow my part of the upgrade instructions I was left with an inability to import data. I spent hours looking at my sources and processes. When I finally entered a ticket (on a saturday night), they called me back within minutes and walked me through what needed to be done. With the normal automated processing steps I have - I would have had a lot of manual work to fix the data up if I had missed a second cycle. Their prompt response and clear instructions let me get past that.
- creating dashboards with interactive functions
- adding sources and data fields
- administration of the system
- user setup
- modfying fields related to a "delete-key" source used to control ensuring duplicate data is not ingested for sources with only "natural" keys
Yes, but I don't use it
- Internal and customer facing portals. Salesforce.com
The integration was clearly documented and worked as documented. A combination of GET/POST statements should make it easy for anyone to integrate to another website or database.
- Zuora, a subscription billing system.
Zuora integration is on the roadmap for Q3/4 2014
- File import/export
- Single Signon
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- ETL tools
none - it is very straightforward.
I am not allowed to disclose the terms of our contract as we signed up as an OEM.
as with any vendor that is not one of the top 5 software/hardware companies in the world - push for what you want. If there is a feature you need and it's "on the roadmap", get it included in the contract/SOW. This is your time to ensure you get what you want at the price/terms you are willing to enter. They are professional sellers - are you a professional buyer?
Yes
yes. follow the published steps and its all good.
- enhancements to HTML5 dashboard
- Birst Visualizer
- Backend data processing enhancements
No
No
August 30, 2013
Great Product with Great Support
- 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.
- It's hard to quantify the time savings and improved decision making that occurred because of Birst, but it is substantial.
30
C-suite, directors, field managers, and analysts
1
This person has other responsibilities besides managing the back-end of Birst.
- Reporting that used to be done in excel is now being done in Birst.
Some of the reporting was done in Salesforce. Most of the reporting was done in excel.
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- In-person training
I'm not sure of the extent of customization my company did.
- Salesforce.
All non designer/admin users log into the service via salesforce.com .
- None that I'm aware of.
Again, not qualified to comment on this question.