Dundas BI - The Extensible BI Platform
March 10, 2016
Dundas BI - The Extensible BI Platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Dundas BI
We are currently in the process of implementing Dundas BI to provide enterprise-wide dashboard and reporting capability. This will be a migration from the previous Dundas offering, Dundas Dashboard. Dundas BI will allow us to provide financial, strategic, and operational dashboards to all levels of users within our organization.
- Integration - Dundas BI has an extensive API that allows for almost limitless flexibility. The available APIs include .NET, JavaScript, and REST APIs. By leveraging the API functionality and standard web development tools like jQuery and CSS the application is extremely easy to customize. Need to include a bootstrap menu or component within your dashboard? Add the bootstrap CSS and insert the necessary HTML in the page. The HTML5-based nature of the application makes it super easy to work with.
- Load balancing - Load balancing is included right out of the box with Dundas BI. Installing a secondary instance and connecting it to your existing Dundas BI database is a simple 10 minute task. Dundas has done a great job here with making installing and managing multiple instances very straightforward.
- Mobile - Dundas BI has outstanding mobile support out of the box. Again, the HTML5 based nature of the tool makes easy work of creating resizable dashboards/components that work on a wide variety of devices and screen resolutions. Obviously, touch-based events are also supported.
- Data Connectivity - Dundas BI includes a wide variety of data connectors out of the box. However, you're also free to create your own data provider using the Dundas BI API if needed.
- Platform - Dundas BI represents a comprehensive BI platform in a single package. It is not just a visualization tool. While we are leveraging SSAS as our primary data source, Dundas has included a built in OLAP engine within the product for companies who wish to implement everything within the platform. The inclusion of R server integration is a nice added bonus.
- Product Maturity - Dundas BI is still a relatively new product on the market--recently releasing their second major version. There is the occasional unexpected behavior or feature that seems to be missing/incomplete. Dundas support is very responsive with these items and tends to release several minor updates between major releases to remedy these issues.
- Documentation - Again, this is a maturity discussion. Dundas is doing a great job adding new content to their support site. However, they still have some progress to make in this area.
- User Community - Dundas does not have an interactive user community that I am aware of. A product of this scale almost demands a forum or similar platform to allow users to collaborate, share code 'snippets' and generally show off what can be done with the product.
We evaluated Tableau as an alternative to Dundas BI during our product selection process. Tableau, arguably a market leader in this space, fell short in a number of key areas. We were not impressed with the extensibility and scalability of the Tableau product. In contrast, Dundas BI demonstrated that it could scale further with similar hardware resources and provided almost limitless extensibility.