Infor Birst vs. TARGIT

Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.

Incentivized

Overall, TARGIT is a valuable tool, and more and more associates are realizing this every day. It's become our standard for sales reporting. I would recommend the software for use at other companies, and I often encourage fellow associates to gain access and basic training.

Incentivized

• Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
• Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.

Incentivized

• The in-memory cube in the Targit suite is an excellent tool that can replace SSAS in theMicrosoft BI suite of tools. InMemory aggregations are lightning-fast compared to Microsoft SSAS.
• Targit also has a cool HTML5 reporting tool.
• It is a complete suite of BI tools including ETL, cube and reports.

Incentivized

• Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly
• Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data
• Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI

Incentivized

• I think including the Data Discovery module in the base package instead of charging extra for it would go a long way to making the software better. If you don't have much background with SSIS or SSAS and you do not buy the module, it will be difficult for you to add or modify data sources.
• There are a couple small tweaks to the interface that would be helpful but are far from necessary. For example, unlike an Excel pivot table, you cannot move the measures above the dimensions in a table interface. There are workarounds for this, however.
• I understand the need to make their calculation language as complex as it is, but it still seems like it could be made simpler. It's helpful that it comes with several standard calculations that you can easily add to an object, but if you want to modify a calculation or create your own, it can be more complicated than I would like.

Incentivized

We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.

The use of Targit is widespread throughout our organization. Our users are becoming comfortable with the tool and Targit has allowed our company to truly grasp the concept of Business Intelligence and making better business decisions through the analysis of our data. Our users are not waiting for IT to create reports for them, they have full rich self-service BI with Targit and are able to turn a great analytical idea or ad-hoc query hypothesis into concrete answers with actionable responses within minutes.

Birst is a reliable BI platform that has developed through uploads via the cloud, easy tabular views, quick manual uploads and links to SQL databases. It however does not compete with other BI tools with the data manipulation and connections when your data is uploaded in the platform and the visualisation and customisations available. The automation aspect is very useful and is one of the top features, alongside the user hierarchy and permissions. Birst is an easy and useful tool for finicial reporting, however is not currently the best option on the market for providing easy to understand, edit and present visualisations.

Incentivized

Everything on the back end needs to be correct, which sometimes it may not be set up or missing some variables. Some of the more difficult parts of Targit require a lot more attention and object creation to work properly

We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer

In a reporting and analytics package there are two distinct performance times to look at. First is the performance of calculating the report data and metrics. I would rate a 9 for this. However, the interface rendering is slow, rating a 7. Dashboards can take 3-5 seconds to load. This is probably not a problem for normal users, as the dashboard render is performed once. My application integrated the dashboard into a commercial product though, with hundreds of customers - so my demands are higher with a large number of end users.

• Poor turnaround time
• Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
• Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
• Lack of inter team work noticed
• Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time

Incentivized

Everyone I've dealt with at Targit genuinely cares about me and my success, and they respond to questions quickly and accurately. There is literally nothing more I could ask for from their support.

Incentivized

I went to their annual user conference (Birst Forward) and their standard training class (Birst Boot Camp) this year, and both were excellent. Very educational, and I got all of the personal attention I needed to get my questions about my specific answered. I've also reached out to the trainers after those events to ask more questions, and they've been great about getting back to me with answers

Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.

Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.

Make sure all of the back end work is done prior to getting Targit set up. Every variable you may need for calculations needs to be correct and every item needs to be uniform so it is read properly.

Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics have low-code no-code features which are easy to deploy and with easy instances creation with a dev-quality-production environment. Good capability on data mapping features from source to intermediate to target with impressive metadata management.

While their product is top of the line and works very well for us, we ultimately selected Targit because of their team. We love working with them and they are always super helpful. Whenever we have a request or issue, they are there ready to happily help us resolve it and move forward.

we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this

• 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.

Incentivized

• It really has answered questions during decision-making conversations where a task item would have been created with days of turnaround time instead of getting the necessary information within minutes during that same conversation.
• Unified Reporting that maintains in alignment with business needs.

Incentivized