InetSoft Webinar: Starting to Do Dashboard Product Evaluations

This is the continuation of the transcript of a product demonstration of InetSoft's BI software for dashboards, reporting and mashups. The presenter is Byron Igoe, Product Manager.

Question: Well, I see you have got quite a product here. I think I’d have to say that I am starting to do dashboard product evaluations, and I have done a few so far, including Tableau, and I see that InetSoft is lot more versatile. So I think I would be eager to do an evaluation of Style Intelligence at some point.

My company has have asked me to do a review for them of the best dashboard tools. So I’ve just started to work on that. And of course everybody hass got a dashboard, so it's hard to pinpoint exactly which ones to look at. I mean there are dozens of dashboard vendors, but now that I am taking a look at what you guys do, it's pretty powerful technology here.

Byron Igoe (BI): Do you need help from us for the dashboard evaluation?

Question: Yeah, I have got a bunch on my list that I have to do, and I have been too busy to do any of them until recently. I have been traveling a lot, but I should slow down next month and maybe we can schedule something then. I have a framework that I step through, and it takes couple of hours to go through it, but if you could jumpstart me as you are showing me here, that would be great. I need to look at the things like design and administration as well as these interfaces and the architecture.

Read how InetSoft saves money and resources with deployment flexibility.

Question: Can you tell me what is your pricing is, what range are you in?

BI: Well, for the small deployments or with small companies, you can get our visualization product for about $12,000, and it goes up from there. We go to a server or CPU based model for larger deployments and unlimited numbers of users, and that can be maybe $70K or $150K with larger deployments, so it's pretty wide range.

Question: Well, I don’t know if there is anything else you want to show me, but it has whet my appetite to take a much deeper dive at some point. I mean I haven’t really seen anyone do as detailed reporting as you do along with the kind of visual analysis and the sophisticated metadata management. I mean either people, usually if they do the visual analysis, they don’t do any data management, or if they do, it's all scripted. So your data mashup engine is pretty powerful, it's all drag-and drop. Now this is one of the biggest differentiators for you versus the other visualization vendors. And this is where users are moving these days, and all of these other visualization vendors have to figure out a way to generate some kind of more sophisticated data modeling capabilities inside their tools, and it's not pretty, usually. QlikTech is at that stage right now where, if you are a good programmer, you can create your own meta model and meta frameworks and do these things that you are doing with data blocks to a certainl degree, but it's also scripted, and it's a nightmare to maintain.

Read why choosing InetSoft's cloud-flexible BI provides advantages over other BI options.

BI: Yes, that’s what we have heard. Okay well we could stop for today and then pick up down the road to help you.

Question: Yes, you know what would help, if we do this, I would like to usually spend a couple hours or so, a half a day, just reviewing material, your existing Web site and white papers, any manuals that you have got. It gets me pretty far along then I can do the evaluation in 2 or 3 hours. So do you have any manuals or some good technical white papers?

BI: We have got very extensive documentation. The white papers tend to stay at a higher level. I think we do have pretty good one talking about the data mashup technology. Again we would be happy to work with you in answering any questions or pointing you in the right direction for certain areas that you want to research.

Question: Thanks, and from what I have seen, you got pretty distinctive advantages out there.