Birst Transforms Cloud Business Intelligence With New Visualizer

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 10, 2013) - Birst Inc., the leader in Cloud BI, today announced Birst Visualizer, a new business-oriented visual discovery capability in Birst's complete end-to-end cloud platform. Combining Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations, the Birst Visualizer reduces time-to-answer for business users. Like all Birst analytic tools, the new Birst Visualizer sits on top of Birst's logical layer and taps into accurate, business-aware enterprise data. Representative of the new era of BI, the Birst Visualizer offers self-service analytics in ways most suited for business roles and skillsets, broadening the reach of enterprise data and adoption of analytics.

"In the new era of BI, a single platform must satisfy the different needs of many kinds of business users," said Birst CEO Brad Peters. "We applied consumer design principles to our new Birst Visualizer so that users who aren't analytics experts -- front-line managers, field sales reps and others -- can explore enterprise data without hesitation. Combining this ease of exploration with Birst's robust underlying data access and management unlocks the power of enterprise data for the entire organization."

A Price to Pay?
Traditional BI solutions, while excellent at providing deep, accurate answers, are too dependent on analytic experts and require too much time and resources to get to meaningful insights. On the other hand, recent data discovery solutions have lured users with their speed of deployment and rich visualizations, but have offered incomplete insights and limited scalability. These desktop data visualization tools, while fast, work only with single or limited data sets and lack data management capabilities, causing users to have access to limited data and arrive at different answers to the same business question.

Companies have been left with a trade-off between accuracy and speed -- and no way to put analytic insights at the fingertips of everyone in the enterprise. By combining self-service to enterprise data and unique analytic capabilities for different audiences, Birst has exposed this trade-off as false.

"Companies are embracing discovery as the new form for quickly gaining valuable insights from within data. This new, highly-iterative approach requires both a visual-driven experience combined with the ease of data mashing through abstraction that is intuitive for the business user," said John O'Brien, Principal Analyst and CEO of Radiant Advisors. "As discovery takes the spotlight in 2014, tools such as Birst Visualizer will enable many business users with the unique combination of easily exploring context through their abstracted yet unified logical layer and providing the visually driven experience that is required for discovery and gaining insights."

A Complete Solution for Every User
The latest addition to Birst's business intelligence platform, Visualizer adds an innovative new way for users to approach analytics. The guided experience speeds information discovery by plotting data instantly, auto-suggesting proper chart types based on selected data combinations and searching as one types.

Birst Visualizer operates on top of Birst's robust and patented data management platform, which includes an automated data warehouse, built-in ETL and uniform logical business layer, enabling all user types and roles to explore and visualize accurate business data. Birst delivers on the promise of self-service BI whether users' needs are visual discovery, pixel-perfect enterprise reporting, interactive dashboards, advanced ad-hoc analysis or predictive modeling.

Beginning today, Birst will showcase Twelve Faces of Business Intelligence on birst.com demonstrating how different users in their functional roles use Birst's analytic capabilities to gain meaningful insights into their business. The Twelve Faces of BI show how in the new era of business intelligence, analytics can be more broadly adopted and impactful. To see the Twelve Faces of BI, visit birst.com/12faces.

To learn more about the new Birst Visualizer, visit birst.com/visualizer.

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.