The dashboards and Visualizer are the most valuable features.

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.

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.

Data visualization: The company I worked for had clients all across US. It was important for us to visually present the details to the senior management so that they were able to relate to the analytics very easily. Additionally, analysts were able to easily build visualizations and explain them when they were presented. Data in charts/maps speak more than data in a spreadsheet.

Also, in the customer-facing portal, it was easier for the customer to see visually than reading a report.

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.

Its ability to create a complete, end-to-end BI solution using a single software stack product is the most valuable feature. This is important when we consider the need to apply agile development approaches to the creation of BI/analytics software implementations.

Birst essentially removes the previous BI software stack paradigm which was premised on the need to have at least three differing software products so as to achieve an end-to-end data processing platform. The need to manage three different software assets was (historically) the reason a BI project could not be ‘agile’.

• 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.

• 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.

Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain.

I found the ETL process very valuable to us.

The valuable features are:

• The ease of reporting
• The ability to customize reporting format
• The ability to have different spaces for users to play with their own data and data sources without impacting other users
• The ability to utilize this solution for both internal and external users

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.

• Good drag and drop dashboard widgets
• Ability to create formulas and custom calculations
• Ability to create ETL jobs for simple data warehouse creation
• Automates the creation of the star schema
• Automatically creates facts and dimensions based on data types

To a technical consultant like me, this is a great great tool for creating value added visualizations, exploring and validating the concerned data while building custom charts tailored to what the business needs.

Dashboards follow the Birst Value Based Design principles which enables users to start at the top to interrogate and review they KVI (Key Value Indicator), then drill down to explore the data and the drivers of the KVIs.

Apart from the existed Visualisation types, Birst enables the use of interactive dashlets using JavaScript and other scripting languages.

The dashboard tool is the most valuable feature, as it gave a quick customizable overview of data I needed to access on a daily basis.

• Built-in application connectors for most common purposes: ERP/CRM AWS and REST API.
• Single suite module from ETL for reporting and dashboards
• Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs.

It can be integrated with Sales Force. Users can jump to the Birst dashboard from SFDC without a repeat login.

The option to build and deploy analytical models quickly, within days rather than months. We use a variety of cloud applications such as Google Analytics.

Birst offered us a solution that had built-in connectors which could be used to build a fact model. We can use this to perform the standard data modelling steps: extract, transform, load, and develop scheduled reporting within weeks.

This tool possesses valuable features such as its ability to perform ETL, extract data from various sources (flat files, relational DBs, application connectors) and dashboard scheduling.

The fact that it is completely cloud based makes the maintenance easier since we don't have the onus of maintaining the server.