Overall Satisfaction with Birst
BIRST is being used mainly by Sales, Finance and Accounting teams. We have embedded BIRST Dashboards into Salesforce pages as well as created dedicated dashboard tabs within Salesforce.com for single sign on. Dashboards and Reports built on BIRST mainly serve for Pipeline and Sales Analytics. Due to the nature of BIRST's unique offering (BI+Database on Cloud), we are able to expand and propose various solutions using BIRST. We are also constantly working towards migrating various silo solutions that are built on Excel/MS-Access into BIRST platform.
- Competitive pricing for the features that are offered: We use various two other BI tools for operational reporting and we always have challenges of expanding it for larger audience due to the licensing cost. BIRST scores very well in the pricing department, with 1/5th of the price compared to other tools, this is an easy decision maker to recommend BIRST.
- Being in Cloud: The strength of BIRST is that the product features that are made available but requires zero installation and administration. The overall support resources needed to maintain and manage the application has drastically come down.
- Ease of use and integration with other data sources: Senior management leaders need quite a lot of information, in an easily readable format without having to go into multiple places. With Dashboard 2.0 and Visualizer, the contents now can be presented very intuitively and visually appealing. Users can also subscribe for certain reports to be delivered at various intervals. With multiple data connectivity options, we have successfully integrated many core systems under one single reporting umbrella.
- Better MS-Office Integration: Almost all the Business users have invested in MS-Office products such as Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Currently there is very limited options available for taking data from BIRST and making it to work with these products. More export options would be a welcome feature among these users. Also the ability to connect to BIRST and refresh/download certain reports through excel would be very helpful.
- Powerful Report Designer: The current version of Designer and Visualizer lack certain features to create Complex reports. Few examples are, ability to create multiple tables in a report, link data from two or more queries and be able to show as one data, templates, free style reports rather than just using different bands etc. A light weight client tool for designer reports will help in faster turn around development time as the current web based interface is slow in designing reports for customized layout options.
- Custom forms / write ability: Dashboard 2.0 has evolved greatly. If custom forms can be created for users to enter certain inputs, this will make Dashboards even more interactive. Just a wish list.
- Live connectivity to Salesforce.com: This will be a very good feature to introduce especially for Sales team. We have been asked at least 1000 times if there is a way to make the data more live or real time.
- Business Objects and IBM Cognos TM1
We use other BI tools within the organization. These tools have been there before we got BIRST and while comparing, BIRST did score well against these tools but the migration cost to convert existing reports/data prevented us from replacing those tools with BIRST.
Infor Birst Feature Ratings
Evaluating Birst and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Analyst Reports
Price. BIRST is priced so competitively among the BI vendors. For such low cost, BIRST provides all the features that an organization needs. Some of the BIRST features are not even available in some of the commercially successful products from other vendors which cost twice or thrice.