oDesk Mines Business Insights Using Birst Business Analytics

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 23, 2013) - Birst Inc., the leader in Cloud BI, today announced that it is providing oDesk with the ability to analyze a broad range of key metrics related to interactions and payments between clients and contractors. As a result, oDesk is able to identify trends that are impacting business results and make informed decisions that optimize company performance.

As the world's largest online workplace, oDesk connects freelancers with hiring clients and additionally enables those clients to hire on demand, manage work-in-progress, and pay their team members with ease. oDesk selected Birst to provide its Marketing, Finance, and Business Operations departments with faster, more cost-effective access to a range of key metrics. Utilizing information provided by Birst to gauge company performance and identify business trends, oDesk is optimizing its allocation of resources.

"Birst provides full functionality, committed customer support, and a terrific cost-to-value ratio for organizations looking to implement BI without making a multimillion dollar investment," said Vikram Kumar, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, oDesk. "With Birst, we only need one employee to oversee our deployment -- as compared to the five or six that other solutions would likely require. Also, our business users have self-service access to ad hoc reporting that speeds decision-making and increases productivity. We're not only saving time and resources, but also gaining greater insight that's clearly benefitting our business."

Due to Birst's fast response time, oDesk users are able to quickly access accurate information, instead of resorting to passing around outdated spreadsheets. With Birst's self-service capabilities and easy, ad hoc analysis, employees can create dashboards and reports as they need them. Additionally, Birst's ease of implementation and automatic data updates have greatly reduced the need for IT support.

"Historically, organizations in search of analytical insight have been left to choose between expensive, time-consuming, inflexible 'big' BI solutions and simplistic data discovery and visualization tools lacking comprehensive functionality," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "Birst is offering a much-needed alternative with a truly agile solution that combines significant savings in time, cost, and resources with enterprise-caliber capabilities that deliver the information users need to make better business decisions."

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.