ORLANDO, Fla. – November 3, 2009 – Today at the TDWI World Conference 2009 in Orlando, Florida, Birst announced Birst 4, The Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite. Birst 4 is the first and only full-featured, fully integrated business intelligence solution, including advanced ETL services, data warehouses created on the fly, and integrated reporting services, such as Smart Dashboards, pixel perfect reporting, and alerts. Since Birst is a SaaS BI solution, customers can typically start enjoying the benefits of full-featured BI in a matter of days or weeks.
"Birst 4 is an affordable, fast, and comprehensive solution for companies who want to deliver the benefits of BI to more people in their organization," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "With Birst 4, companies can quickly and easily achieve a comprehensive BI solution at a cost that is reasonable for deploying to entire executive, sales, marketing, finance, and operations teams. With Birst 4, the goal of Pervasive BI is easily within reach for far more organizations."
Like enterprises, even small and midsize organizations can have complex BI needs. Birst 4 meets the needs of the most demanding business intelligence environments by expanding upon Birst’s automated, integrated business intelligence to help companies along three main areas:
Any Data Anywhere- Birst Live Access
- Birst Unified Metadata Model
- Birst Cloud Connectors
Greater Control and Capability
- Advanced ETL Services
- Enhanced Administration and Catalog Management
- Birst Reporting Services
- Birst Alerts and Exception Reports
- Birst Application Templates, including Birst for Salesforce.com
Empowering the Business User
- Smart Dashboards
- Drag and Drop Pivot Tables
The key features from each of these areas are:
- Birst Live Access
The newest addition to Birst Data Services, Birst Live Access allows organizations to make direct use of pre-existing data warehouses, datamarts, or local databases, leveraging Birst’s advanced analytical capabilities without having to upload data. Data stays securely behind the firewall, but can be analyzed “in the cloud” with Birst, as well as analyzed in combination with data from other uploaded sources, such as spreadsheets or uploaded databases. Birst Live Access allows sophisticated organizations to make the most of existing data resources without having to upload information to the cloud. - Birst Advanced ETL Services
Extending Birst’s automated analytical data store functionality, Birst Advanced ETL Services allows organizations to create very sophisticated and layered data transformations that traditionally have required complex and expensive on-premise ETL tools. Fully integrated into Birst’s Unified Metadata Model, complex transformations are far easier to create and faster to deploy, and it’s far easier to ensure metadata consistency. - Birst Reporting Services
Birst provides a fully integrated reporting environment that includes pixel perfect reporting, operational reporting, banded reporting, alerts, and operational, real-time and exception reports. In traditional BI solutions, each of these elements is often provided separately and requires integration. Birst is the only SaaS vendor to provide fully functional report authoring and distribution services. - Smart Dashboards
The upgraded Flex dashboards now offer business users even greater capability to explore data trends and discover answers to critical business questions entirely on their own, without any reliance on IT or specialized business analysts. Advanced filtering, drill-down capability, and "drag and drop" controls put answers at business users' fingertips, without coding.
"Birst 4 is a major breakthrough for Birst and its customers," said Kevin Farrell, President of Fillmore Technologies, a Birst partner. "Just last year, Birst launched the first automated, integrated BI solution. Now, Birst revolutionizes BI yet again by providing a Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite at a price that is affordable across the business spectrum. The interest that we see in Birst has never been higher, and existing customers can't wait for the upgrade."
Existing Birst customers have already thoroughly evaluated the new Birst 4 solution and are giving it strong reviews. "Children's Choice is dedicated to providing high quality childcare, and our existing Birst deployment has already given us tremendous insight into performance improvement opportunities that uphold our tradition of excellence," said Dan Lawler, CFO of Children's Choice, a provider of early care and education programs to children and families. "After getting a sneak preview of Birst 4, we're excited about the advanced functionality and improvements for business user self-service reporting. We're looking forward to deploying it broadly throughout our organization."
Birst 4 will be available in mid-November. Existing Birst customers will be upgraded automatically. Interested companies can contact Birst for a free trial by contacting sales@birst.com. More information on Birst 4 can be found by going to birst.com/birst4.
About Birst
Birst™ is the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions. Through its Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite, Birst brings the benefits of fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is the winner of the Red Herring 100 Award 2009, the TDWI Best Practices Award 2009, and the Web Award for Software Standard of Excellence.
For more information, please visit www.birst.com.
For more information, contact:
Kimberly Weber
Atomic PR
birst@atomicpr.com
(415) 402-0230
