Item: Infor Birst
Rating: 7
Author: Jeremy Schichor

Overall Satisfaction with Birst

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Birst is used across my organization, but particularly by the sales and marketing departments. It is used to track pipeline flow from impressions to revenue.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Birst's SQL-like language is conveniently familiar for experienced developers
Birst integrates well with Salesforce and external CSV data sources.
Birst's support staff is reasonably responsive, if not always able to provide a satisfactory result.

Cons

Birst contains several sub-systems with similar, but signifcantly incompatible, syntax and functionalities. This leads to confusion and difficulty.
Birst provides insufficient control over how charts are rendered and how dashboard prompts are displayed and used. This has lead to significant dissatisfaction on the part of those for whom I've developed dashboards.
Significant parts of Birst resemble a relational database, but cannot be made to function like one. This results in jumping through complicated hoops to construct the fact tables for a multiple-relation data system.

Birst's ETL is better suited to our purposes than Alooma's stream-based processing.
Birst's designer is more mature and meets or needs better than Periscope's reporting functionality, at the time I investigated it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Birst is excellent for simple reports backed by a straightforward data structure. It is less helpful for complex reports with highly permutative prompts, based on a complicated data structure with poor data hygiene.

Infor Birst Feature Ratings

Comments

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The more complicated your needs, the harder it is to use Birst.