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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
YouTube
Analytics Anytime, Anywhere - Birst Mobile Demo
YouTube
Automated Data Refinement in Infor Birst - Demo
YouTube
Best Practices For Increasing Adoption of Analytics - Demo
YouTube
Infor Birst How-To Series – Connecting to Databases
YouTube
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
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 Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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(186)
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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March 13, 2015
Birst, a dashboard tool for any size company
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Availability 24x7 makes the product attractive. Our users know they can get their information whenever they need it.
- Flexible charts allow our users to select dashboard data based on time periods and other dimensions.
- Adhoc report dashboards allows our users to build and save custom dashboards as needed.
- Some errors are difficult to understand and solve without support. Better help content would benefit admins trying to solve issues.
- The system can have limitations with large amounts of data. Too much data can slow down processing or cause the report to not render a result.
- Better understanding of trends in sales and profitability.
- Ability to look at information by many single or combination of dimensions.
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.
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