Valen(R) Analytics Embeds Birst Within Transformative Tool for Achieving Insurance Underwriting Profitability

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 8, 2013) - Birst Inc., the leader in Cloud BI, today announced that Valen Analytics, a leading provider of proprietary data, analytics, and predictive modeling to help insurance carriers manage and drive underwriting profitability, has embedded Birst's BI platform within its InsureRight solution. Leveraging Birst's easy-to-use, enterprise caliber capabilities, InsureRight combines Valen's proprietary database with insurance carriers' portfolio-related information to provide advanced analytical insight -- including predictive modeling -- that helps carriers manage risk and optimize policy pricing. 

Developed using Birst's BI platform, InsureRight is providing insurance underwriters with the ability to quickly make fact-based decisions regarding policy risk and pricing. To help underwriters determine policy risk, InsureRight provides access to Valen's anonymized, proprietary database, which has scored more than 20 million policies using robust predictive models. Additionally, InsureRight helps underwriters improve profitability and reduce losses. To enable underwriters to effectively leverage InsureRight, Birst's intuitive user interface provides easy access to the detailed information underlying its predictive models.

"Birst combines the best of all BI worlds, providing advanced visualization and analytical capabilities, as well as an automated backend that combines and transforms data, making it ready for use. With Birst handling the heavy lifting, we've been able to refocus IT resources on other priorities," said Greg Penn, Vice President of Operations, Valen Analytics. "Also, Birst is the only cloud BI solution that provides the ability to deploy on-premise, as a virtual appliance. By allowing us to keep it completely under our control, Birst ensures our customers have 100 percent confidence in the data we deliver."

Supported by Birst technology, InsureRight is also addressing the needs of insurance carrier executives and underwriting managers, enabling easier and more effective management of overall portfolio risk and the optimization of tradeoffs between policy volume and profits. Managers and executives can determine whether portfolios perform as predicted and -- using Valen's proprietary database -- how that performance compares to industry averages. Additionally, ongoing portfolio profitability can be measured according to various dimensions of interest, including geography, agency, and underwriter.

"Birst is the only cloud-based BI solution pairing enterprise-caliber capabilities with patented automation to provide industry-leading analytical insight quickly, and without burdening IT," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "When embedded within other applications this combination differentiates products and services, increases customer loyalty, and drives incremental revenue with minimal time and effort."

About Valen Analytics
Valen Analytics helps carriers manage and segment their portfolios in order to drive underwriting profitability. Valen's InsureRight Platform is the only solution with proprietary insight into portfolio metrics and risk characteristics to identify pockets of pricing inadequacy and redundancy. A dynamic portfolio management tool provides access to Valen's contributory database containing policy level analysis not available elsewhere. The Valen contributory database is anonymized and has scored over 20 million policies using robust predictive models in Homeowners, Workers' Compensation, Commercial Auto, Telematics, Commercial Package, and BOP. Learn more about Valen at www.valen.com.

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 more than a thousand businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs. Learn to think fast at www.birst.com and join the conversation @birstbi.