Services and Expertise

Infor Birst, It's All We Do!

 

What is Birst?

Birst, founded in 2004, emerged as a trailblazer in the business intelligence (BI) sector by delivering one of the first cloud-native BI platforms. This innovative approach enabled organizations to efficiently source, refine, and present standardized data insights at scale, facilitating informed business decisions.

In June 2017, Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications, completed its acquisition of Birst. This strategic move aimed to enhance Infor’s cloud services by integrating Birst’s comprehensive BI capabilities, thereby offering customers advanced analytics and data visualization tools within a unified platform.

Birst’s client portfolio includes prominent organizations such as American Express, Citrix, Kellogg’s, and Schneider Electric, underscoring its versatility across various industries.

Regarding industry recognition, Birst was included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms until 2021. However, in the 2022 edition, Birst was removed for not meeting the updated inclusion criteria.

Overall, Birst’s pioneering efforts in cloud-based BI have significantly contributed to the evolution of data analytics solutions, offering scalable and integrated tools that empower businesses to derive actionable insights from their data.

What can Birst do?

Birst streamlines and accelerates the processes of gathering, analyzing, reporting, and planning key business information.

  • Unifies complex data across sources.
  • Ability to analyze complex processes and models in real time.
  • Enables agility with uniform and global views by blending centralized and decentralized data.
  • Provides trust throughout the organization because values are correct.
  • Enables users by providing the ability to use a variety of tools. Engaged users drives adoption and ongoing usage.
  • Ability to get data on demand data using a mobile device.

With Birst, users improve their ability to:

  • Access critical business information.
  • Filter and analyze data for better decision making.
  • Publish information throughout their organizations-anytime, anywhere.
  • Update reports and analysis on a timely basis without requiring IT resources and involvement.
  • Connect data from multiple sources into a single report.
  • Quickly transform raw data into valuable information.
  • Get faster results and higher ROI on your business intelligence investment.
  • Plan and forecast their business.

BIRST IMPLEMENTATION

A thoughtful implementation of Birst can increase your ROI while making it easier to grow your suite of analytics and rapidly respond to business change in the future.

Whether you are hosting your own Birst appliance or using Birst cloud, our expert knowledge of modeling and architecture will ensure you have the best solution for your business.  And we will design and develop meaningful, insightful visualizations that work together on dashboards to give you the answers you are looking for and help drive adoption.

ONGOING MENTORING

You’ve got a great Birst solution.  So now what?  We can provide you with ongoing mentoring and support of your team’s efforts to master this rich and deep analytics platform, helping you keep up-to-date with advances in Birst’s modules while advising you on best practices in order to craft the best business intelligence environment possible for your business.

Whether your business needs include networked BI, always-on, OEM, or embedded custom visualizations,  we can help guide you to the best solution, and can help improve your team’s expertise as well.

While Infor Support is generally very good, and Birst Support is certainly very deep, we are finding it easier at times to talk to ADG than Birst/Infor Support. A quick answer to a question or a 15-minute conversation on a topic can go a long way.

As an example of how valuable this sort of collaboration can be, together we figured out a way to get some very powerful functionality into Hybrid 11.19.7 and Birst. While working with ADG, an old trick came up that we got from Infor Dev years ago – the use of the SQL command ‘OPENQUERY’. Using this allows us to hit Live SX on-prem data from within a SQL Server query using ODBC on that server’s host. Since Birst can see SQL Server, ADG immediately picked that up and ran with it. This will allow some near real-time access to live data from within Birst, which is huge for fast-moving operations. Looking forward to that…

We had a lot of trouble finding resources for Birst when we got started on 11.19.7, and the reason for that is only now becoming clear. Our consultants from Infor and its partners typically are stellar and much appreciated. However, Birst is a new platform, and it is different, structurally, from anything we have used for decades.

It is interesting to note that while ADG is a stellar resource for Birst, they are just now learning the ins and outs of distribution (moment of silence, please…).

That said, ADG is an impressive company whose presence is much appreciated here.

 

Wayne Kessler – Chief Information Officer

Billows Electric Supply

TUG Reporting & Analytics Group Leader 

Clients We’ve Served

Infor Partner

Agile Dragon Group, LLC

Billpayne@agiledragongroup.com

PRIVACY POLICY

Infor Partner