With all of the claims and counter-claims, the big money acquisitions and advertising hype, it’s easy to get the impression that every big enterprise software company out there has easily made the jump to the Cloud, mastered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and is forging ahead to a glorious future that you are lucky to share.
I’ve always believed there is no better way to tell the value of something than to have the actual end user explain it. Last week we videotaped a half a dozen of our Bay Area customers. We interviewed each to understand and capture how Birst is meeting the analytic challenges within their organizations. Over a couple of days a colleague and I drove up and down the peninsula with a videographer in tow and visited our customers’ offices.
Last week Oracle Corporation released its quarterly financials. . . and rocked the entire enterprise software industry on its heels. It did the same thing to the stock market.
MicroStrategy has long been a strong, independent and iconic leader within the business intelligence (BI) industry. Recent market developments, however, are presenting MicroStrategy with a Hobson’s Choice: commit itself to dramatically lowering its product’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – thereby reducing the services revenue that represents the majority of its total revenue – or lose its whole business. The choice here is harder than it seems.
Organizations invest in analytic capabilities – or any software, for that matter – in order to be more successful at what they do. Whether that be a sales organization looking to sell more effectively, a manufacturing organization wanting to better manage its supply chain, a software provider trying to improve its customers’ experience by providing rich analytics – all of these organizations are investing time, resources and money in order to drive results for themselves or their customers.
Those of us old enough to remember the eponymous Wimpy from Popeye know that expression well. It stood in stark contrast to our parents’ admonishment to “never put off for tomorrow what you can do today.”
Warning: This blog is more technical than our usual blog entries, but it serves to explain the value (and power) of Birst.
Now, how does ETL fit in? ETL uses the Birst Query Language (BQL). The language for report-level (post-aggregation) expressions uses THE SAME SYNTAX AND ENGINE as ETL scripts. The only difference is that some statements only function when running in a script (e.g. WRITERECORD) and others are only allowed when working in an expression for a report (e.g. Lookup function).
The annual Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms dropped on my desk last week with a 64-page thud. I knew Birst would be included in the Challengers Quadrant of the 2013 report a few days earlier, but it was a different feeling altogether to turn the pages and find out this year’s “who’s who” in the Business Intelligence industry.
Recently, I ran across an interesting blog post. In it, the author posits that SaaS BI has failed because of a number of factors related to the acquisition and modeling of source data, including:
1. Gaining access to the data where it resides
2. Transforming it to a format suitable for reporting
3. Synching it with the source system/location on a regular basis so that it stays up to date
