Birst: 'Automating' the Big Data reservoirs

As Big Data gets 'bigger', the efficacy of new Business Intelligence solutions to deal with massive data reservoirs is being questioned. Traditional BI solutions are incredibly powerful, providing answers to deep questions from huge data chunks. But they require mammoth resources to run and are not scalable. On the other hand, new solutions are powerful enough to provide answers to users within seconds. "However, unlike old solutions, new ones can’t get deep enough and the answers they provide are shallow," says Brad Peters, CEO of Birst, a company that is leveraging the power of both old and new solutions to present a new experience to its customers.

Founded in 2004 by Brad Peters and Paul Staelin, Birst, based in San Francisco, provides a cloud-based platform for business intelligence. The company’s products for business analytics can be deployed from a public or a private cloud. "We're giving business meaning to data – by enabling business users to analyze all of their data, from all types of sources, to solve real problems, fast. Our enterprise caliber cloud BI approach is less costly and more agile than traditional, onpremise BI and more powerful than data discovery," says Southard Jones, VP of Product Strategy.

Birst targets midmarket and departmental enterprise organizations that have specific analytic application requirements. The company also sells to the OEM market, to other software providers, who embed Birst as the analytics engine within their application. Build.com, a leading online retailer is using Birst's BI platform to combine and analyze a variety of customer-related data. "With Birst, we're increasing efficiencies, decreasing costs, making better decisions, and improving employee productivity. We expect to save more than 100 hours per month in time spent generating reports," says Brandon Proctor, Vice President of Marketing, Build.com.

Recognized as a "Challenger" in the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Birst provides a complete BI platform that makes raw data analytic ready and integrates rich visualizations to explore it all within a single tool. Unlike some of the traditional on-premise, older BI solutions that frequently take months and in some cases, over a million dollars to deploy. Birst's automated data modeling, automated data warehouses and rich visualizations in the cloud can be deployed in as little as two weeks, helping to vastly reduce the total cost of ownership. "While other to manage the data analytics platform, "Birst let business users get answers for logical queries like ‘when was the last time orders above $2000 came in from the customers?’," says Southard. "We integrate unstructured Big Data with structured operational data to empower businesses to answer questions that they have not been able to address before.

Birst's customers range in size from very large such as American Express, Kellogg's and Motorola to the rapidly growing such as Jive, Aruba and Virgin Health Miles as well as numerous others. Today over a thousand organizations use Birst for their analytic needs.

Birst partners with more than 60 solution providers across the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Technical partnerships include Amazon, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Marketo and others.

Coupled with the agility of the cloud, Birst is focused to give business teams the ability to solve real problems. As Southard puts it, "Birst is dedicated to providing 'knowledgeable' insights to users at a lower cost," a statement that is supported by the ever-growing number of Birst's customer.