Nerd Crush.
February 28, 2017
Nerd Crush.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Birst
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.
- Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
- Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
We preferred to have an all-in-one cloud solution that could connect to Salesforce.com and on-premise servers. I thought the combination of ETL built into a star-schema was unmatched. QlikView could do something similar, but the resulting data file was not an enterprise grade data warehouse. The visuals are great, I have no problem with them but Tableau is probably a bit better there. Our final choice was between Birst and a combination of Tableau, Redshift, and a third party Redshift ETL. It was an easy choice for us.