WebFOCUS

Avantages

OK, this will sound like a promo - but this is real feedback based on real life experience using various BI and FR tools over the years.
Over the last decade Finance/BI has inherited many ops tasks as traditional IT departments push to migrate BI and financial reporting to “user self-service”. (Keeps their headcount down and mine up!)
WebFocus has all the ‘sexy’ stuff that software vendors are promoting. Great, but I am a production shop and 90% of what we do is just day-to-day critical. WebFocus provides the three critical components I need from a BI software package:
InfoAssist helps us manage through staffing churn. I don’t need to hire BI staff with WebFocus experience as most Individuals with any kind of BI experience can launch InfoAssist and figure it out themselves.
Reportcaster: My staff can manage standard scheduled report distribution in Reportcaster. Once set up it’s easy to maintain.
Speed: “Instant” graphs and analytics is today’s expectation. We’ve got more data than we have time to do report development, so WebFocus gets us to the data for all the one-off reports and charts.

Inconvénients

This is not really a con, but a heads up. WebFocus is a robust BI tool. Setup and security requires your IT Department's "buy in" to support the tool. Yes, it's a BI reporting package, and it can be used for just that, but WebFocus can do so much more - and sooner or later you'll want the 'more'

Avantages

WebFOCUS does it all in an single platform. From an entry-level single-click user to our most advanced super users running their own ad hoc queries. It is our enterprise reporting solution, and almost every department in our company uses it in one way or another. It is almost unheard of when we run into a reporting challenge that WebFOCUS cannot handle. It is extremely flexible and robust.

Inconvénients

Flexibility comes with complexity, that is a fact of life, and a fact of this software too. When diving into more advanced features, there is a certain level of necessary complexity. Customizations are also a bit of a trap when it comes to future upgrades. We have learned the hard way that just because we can do something a certain way doesn't necessarily mean we should. A fully customized application will work beautifully in the current version, but will make upgrades an uncomfortable experience. Lastly, the GUI for WebFOCUS has not always been the sleekest visually. This is rapidly changing for the better, but historically has lagged behind other reporting vendors.

Avantages

It's a wide open platform with endless customization options. We have yet to run into an issue that was not able to be met by the work done in webfocus. They're online presence is wonderful for tech support and forums which often find us most of our solutions to any sticky situations.

Inconvénients

So many individual pieces in this suite of products, that it's sometimes confusing as to what you actually own, what you need to buy and what you are getting by with. Upgrades happen quite often, so if you don't have a dedicated system engineer to devote time for upgrades, you'll be bringing in your system engineer that was provided by IBI.

Avantages

It's very easy to connect different data sources and start mapping your data and building intelligent reports. I haven't found a relevant data source, yet, that WebFOCUS can't connect to. The latest versions of the product make user interaction extremely intuitive and put a lot of power in the hands of end users to create their own dashboards and reports from managed data sources. With the full AppStudio development tool, extremely complicated scenarios can be analyzed and developed by your developers and published to the users.

Inconvénients

Until very recently, there was not a good method for Source Control of WebFOCUS content. For any company that has their BI fall under SOX Audit controls, this might be a little difficult to deal with.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.