Birst Appoints Jay Larson as New Chief Executive Officer

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 22, 2014) - Birst, the leader in Cloud BI, today announced that it has appointed Jay Larson as its new Chief Executive Officer. With more than 25 years of experience in the software industry and a decade in bringing SaaS applications to market, Larson will build upon Birst's established Cloud BI leadership to further accelerate growth and help Birst become the next dominant SaaS solution provider. Birst's co-founder and current CEO, Brad Peters, announced his new roles of Chairman and Chief Product Officer, focusing his efforts on further expanding Birst's disruptive and powerful BI platform. Birst also announced today that Paul Staelin, co-founder and VP of Customer Success, has been appointed Chief Customer Officer and will continue to ensure success across the customer lifecycle and oversee company operations.

"Opportunities to bring someone of Jay's caliber into an organization are few and far between. His addition to Birst allows us to capitalize on the incredible position we have already created over the past years and to take it even further," said Peters. "I believe that overcoming the real obstacles to running data-driven businesses begins with building great products. Bringing Jay into the organization allows me to focus on what I am most passionate about: building amazing products that extend our leadership in the BI market. With the addition of Jay, Birst will have the best of both worlds: unsurpassed product vision and development capabilities, and also world-class leadership to address our operational and go-to-market issues. This level of product and operational leadership is unmatched in our industry. Our customers win big with today's announcement of Jay as our new CEO."

In his new role as Chief Product Officer, Peters will leverage his technological expertise and deep understanding of the analytics market to further extend Birst's innovative end-to-end approach to business intelligence. He will lead the company's continuing advancement in the BI sector as Chairman of Birst while working closely with Larson to fuel the company's growth to deliver to the world's leading organizations a business intelligence platform that is second to none.

"I am honored to have the opportunity to lead the impressive team at Birst. The BI industry is going through a period of tremendous disruption. Legacy IT-centric BI platforms lack the agility to support current business needs. Lightweight discovery tools are missing needed functionality and cannot address data governance requirements. Birst's cloud-based approach to real BI that addresses both IT and end user needs is unique and has taken off like a rocket," Larson said. "This is an exciting time at Birst; I'm eager to take the helm of Birst as we accelerate our growth and become the undisputed BI industry leader."

Larson brings extensive go-to-market and SaaS expertise to his new role. He most recently served as the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Jive Software, following his role as Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for SuccessFactors. During his tenure at SuccessFactors, revenue grew rapidly from approximately $100 million to over $350 million, leading up to its acquisition by SAP. Prior to SuccessFactors, Larson was a senior executive with Mercury Interactive. During his time there, the sales organization grew to more than 3,000 professionals and revenue grew from approximately $300 million to over $1 billion before the company was acquired by Hewlett Packard. Larson's previous experience includes sales leadership roles at Oracle Corporation, Network Associates and Siebel Systems. He holds a B.A. degree from Harvard University and an M.B.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Jay brings an extraordinary background that is the perfect fit for Birst. His addition takes the existing talent, innovation and perseverance to new heights," said Doug Leone, a member of Birst's Board of Directors and Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital. "This is a wonderful pairing of business savvy with business intelligence; we have the dream team in place and I'm excited to see Birst take its disruption of the BI industry to new heights."

About Birst

Birst is the only enterprise-caliber Business Intelligence platform born in the cloud. Less costly and more agile than Legacy BI and more powerful than Data Discovery, Birst is engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to give meaning to data-all types and sizes. Coupled with the agility of the Cloud, Birst gives business teams the ability to solve real problems. Fast. Find out why Gartner named Birst a Challenger in its most recent BI Magic Quadrant and why thousands of businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs. Learn to think fast at www.birst.com and join the conversation @birstbi.