ibi Reviews

Flexibility - how our users have full control of there data. Scalability - be able to manage multiple clients with ease

Complexity - have such a flexibility product has cause it to be very complex and partly a black box, where issues may arrive in different parts of the system

The company I work for has many existing reports in OLAP and other formats. They purchased WebFocus to begin building out and modernizing client portals, with more visually-appealing charts and graphs in dashboard layout. On top of this, my team and I were all brand new to WebFocus. Within a few months of implementing WebFocus, and partnering with a couple of WebFocus consultants (whom are top-notch by the way), we successfully launched our first client portal on the WebFocus platform. I joined the team earlier this year, so I wasn't involved in the evaluation process, but from what I hear of the other tools that were evaluated, we would have already surpassed their capabilities early on in our project.

From what I have seen so far, WebFocus is a very powerful BI tool, with probably more capabilities than we have would ever think of using. We've yet to reach the limits of the tool, and believe me when I say that we have tried.

The WebFocus format and language is a little different than what I already knew. So there is a learning curve. However, with some training, and the will to learn, it gets much easier in a few months.

My team at a federal agency has used Information Builders platforms for more than 10 years to manage and report on financial data. The single biggest advantages that the WebFOCUS products share is their flexibility and adaptability. The ability to create anything and connect to everything is huge.

The flip-side to WebFOCUS's tremendous flexibility is its maturity and complexity. The platform has existed for so long and attempts to accomplish so much that the ramp-up for new developers can feel daunting.

I like that you can combine data from all sources into one single report or chart and the user will not know how many data sources were used or notice any lag time from retrieval

The composers still crash when working in them and it is not easy to modify a page once it is created. Also you cannot get to the code behind and there is still old control code left over after they have been removed from the pages. This can cause browsers to get confused and pages to slow down when loading

I like the new look of App Studio . it can do many powerful things. I loved the html composer and the easy way to create the new portals. In a few minutes you can create powerful dashboards.

infoassist since I did not used it so often.
Sometimes the workarounds do not work.
Most of the things are documented but sometimes some specific things we need to search in google to find the answer.
sometimes takes too long to solve an issue.

recently converted mainframe jobs to webfocus environment. Most existing jobs were easily ported over to distributed environment will few changes. However, this gave us an opportunity to do some well needed tuning on jobs that have been running on mainframe for 15-20 year. Tuning has increase efficiency and speed in new Linux environment and we are incurring cost savings by moving application to a distributed environment over IBM mainframe

i currently have no negative comments to make

Very scale-able and robust - it provides a solid platform for BI & Analytics
Report building tools are fairly easy to use, yet powerful
Software support team is excellent

Tremendous flexibility in deployment can lead to challenges in initial set-up and in ensuring multiple environment configurations are consistently applied.

Broad functionalities - more than other tools
Very close customer support and relations
Look and feel is now in the new version modern and slick
Faster development and release cycles results in shorter wait time for new functionalities

Because its less known than the big tools executives might not buy in into the tool
Maybe still has some legacy "issues"
Still takes some bigger efforts to upgrade to newer versions

Modern UI, taking the complexity out of the process of ingesting data and allowing business users to create reports, charts, and dashboards to gain insight into their business.

multiple tools to create BI solutions, although IBI is on a path to consolidate tool set. Would also like to see more accelerators for the various business units to help accelerate adoption in our company.

The Customer Support, IB has the best. Never have seen any other company so focused on customers. From sales, so systems, to project management, to development, etc - The Best.

None - Our issues have not been with the software, it's our existing technology, management, servers, etc within the State's Dept of Technology that hinders and creates issues with our software.

We looked at a lot of tools but they would not have been a fully functioning enterprise solution like IBI is.

It is a lot to learn! And we are barely scratching the surface on its capabilities.

User friendly, comprehensive functionality, incredible customer support, great annual user conference, extensive free online training videos, new functionality is added continually including from requests from customers.

Great customer service; very flexible product; drill down feature is fantastic; multiple capabilities to fit a businesses needs

being a flexible product comes with complexity and a learning curve in full understanding of their vast system

Extremely flexible and capable of handling any visualization needs.

Almost too many ways to be able to do things. Requires time to understand the 'best' way to accomplish a given task.

Webfocus has some amazing BI capabilities out of the box. Drag and drop interfaces for creating reports, charts, and managing data are very easy to use and powerful

Troubleshooting issues is difficult. It often takes a lot of effort to figure out workarounds for things that seem like they should be simple.

Flexibility. Can customize anything. This supports swiftly meetings all business needs and business questions.

Flexibility. Can customize anything. This is a con due to challenge with the customization brings maintenance considerations and requires high talent to support.

the diversity, flexibility, ease of use and unlimited capabilities. Easy to train end users. Great knowledgeable customer support.

The only con I have about the product is that the capabilities are huge and you don't always know what you know.

The things that it can do are remarkable.
Ability to create reports through coding or though GUI interface.
The GUI interface is pretty helpful especially while learning

Learning curve is huge but worth the extra work.
Error codes could be a little more helpful. Sometimes when you receive an error you cannot tell what or where the error is.

The ability to make it do anything and everything

Some things that would seem to be easy are difficult

The product is so user friendly and can be used by multiple levels of knowledge. HIGHLY Recommend!

There is nothing I can think of as a con...

The ease of development for new reportinf

Ad hoc reporting seems to be pretty difficult

Ease of Use, Easily gain insights about data and performance.

Limited amount of information available outside of IBI

Has many bells and whistles that make the world of reporting and developing fun again. It provides much needed power and command right at the user's fingertips.

It takes knowledge of many other languages to produce the most eye pleasing reports and dashboards. JavaScript and CSS are a must if you want anything close to what they cover in a sales presentation. This was a little misleading at first and makes it not quite so "out of the box" as billed.

IBI is the best software company. Great customer support, training and service. The product is solid and customizable beyond what other BI tools can offer.

After working with the product for over 6 years, I've have mostly positive experiences. The few times that there have been questions, the tech support staff have help us overcome the hurdles.

The software is flexible in being able to code as well as use GUI.

The html page builder can be slow at times in the version our company is currently using.