Birst Reviews

1) Connection to external sources : Birst uses several connection methods to take data in from your data sources and stages it into its own “Data Mart” if you will.

2) Staging and Warehousing: This stages data from several sources makes Birst a fairly robust data warehouse solution. A lot of vendors can do that well and so does Birst.

3) Modeling: Birst utilizes a start schema for dimensional modeling of the data that is staged.

4) Visualization: In most vendors Data warehousing and then data modeling were two separate functionalities. The idea was to be able to sell visualization tools as a separate suite to users who already had an in-house warehouse.

However, recently, several vendors have started combining the warehousing and visualization abilities into one stop shop. For example, for a long time, Tableau was and probably is the leading provider of visualizer tools but warehousing data through tableau is much more cumbersome and resource intensive. Birst, Qlikview etc. have not been able to provide the exact beautification and features in the visualizer for self-service dashboards as Tableau but they have managed to seamlessly allow data visualization and dashboard development from the warehouse on the go.

This goes into the technical inter-operability of the warehouse with visualization, data understandability, query performance and render time.

The objective of using Birst-mediated dashboards is to deliver interactive and online information to our clients in a client-specific and data-distributed format. We are yet to realize the real return on the investment given the need to alter the underlying intention of the product’s use.

ETL process is excellent as well as the admin tools to set it up. Creation of the meta-data layer has been well thought out by the Birst design team. Working with the front-end Dashboard, KPI and Dashlet tools is a snap. Easy to learn and use. The Mobile version is coming on strong in 2017. Just reviewed the product with the Product Manager and it's the way forward for being used on the go.

Prior to using Birst, Apex did not have BI readily available to the customers. Now we have three tool sets, each matching one of our product lines. The customers are able to see patterns and trends never before available. It opens up their eyes to changing their business to increase profitability.

Birst admin is a great module which helps standardize data to a gold standard. We are able to integrate very quickly and get new data elements into the model.

Our organization is helping a cancer hospital bring insight from their data. We work on highly regulated PHI data.

The dashboards and Visualizer are the most valuable features.

Birst has made it easier for us to provide embedded data visualization tools to our customers.

Some valuable features in this product are:

• Auto modelling: Simply by uploading Excel, we can start reporting.
• Birst's auto feature creates ETL in the back-end by analyzing data.
• Cloud-based: This cloud-based tool is easy to maintain and can be managed with a single window.
• Single-window development: No need to maintain / install multiple tools for metadata, reports development and service management.

We use Birst for developing solutions and prototypes, that are helpful for our customers.

• Cloud based: One platform with all the ETL, connectivity, report and dashboard tools in one product. This allows for faster development and no integration problems.
• Network BI: (The ability to share data marts/stores/ERP/CRM/RDBMS data, etc.) This is a unique feature for data virtualization in the cloud. It enables Enterprise BI in the cloud.
• The ability to deploy DWHs at lightning speed. This affords 60% faster development than traditional BI projects.
• Supports mobile connectivity and interaction. All the information, anytime and anywhere on your desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
• It is a step towards self-service-BI because of the user-friendly interface.

This is the best cloud based BI platform/solution out there.

We are a vendor/partner, so we have been able to create a valuable business model for migrating our customers from legacy systems to this cloud BI platform. Internally, we are gradually introducing this product enterprise-wide to support various operational divisions. As a partner we host our own Appliances for the SMB market in the Benelux area.

• Scalability: Because the product can be set up in cloud-based systems, the scalability is there.
• Availability: The user interface is fully browser-based, so no installation for users is always a big plus.
• ‘Networked BI’-approach: In technical ways, it makes all of the core measurements consistent throughout the company. It tackles the issue related to inconsistency in reporting inside company departments.

Licensing has been shown to have some issues.

There are specific Birst connectors included in the out-of-the-box price tag, and there are several more connectors available in Birst that have their own license fee.

Thinking from a customer perspective, this is really important to know. As per my experience, the out-of-the-box price tag is the one that is used and the extra license of connectors available was sort of a ‘surprise’. However, this was explained by Birst and it is understandable that their other connectors cost extra.

My own experience just made me think that this was a hidden cost that they tried to hide, but keeping that in mind, it might only be my experience as to how this surfaced for us, because I had this image of Birst that you pay _this_ amount and get everything.

I found the ETL process very valuable to us.

It has provided new levels of analytic consolidation.