Birst is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company focusing on BI tools and solutions. Presenting are
Brad Peters, CEO and
Stefan Schmitz, Sr. Director of Product Management. Product launched in September last year and has some large customers, such as RBC Wealth Management, Spectrum Consulting, and Securian. Birst currently has more than 50 customers most of whom do not want
their name released. A typical customer has 50 users with approximately 500 gigabytes of data. However, the largest customer has around
five thousand users, terabytes of data, dozens of data sources, and displaced Oracle Financials with same functionality at a much lower cost. Birst is staffed with experienced BI veterans and funded by Sequoia Capital and Nummer-Winblad Venture Partners. "We are well funded," said Peters with hopes of being profitable next year.
Peters described their target market at the gap between end-user ad-hoc reporting and departmental analytics, as shown with the dotted oral in the figure.
Birst emphasized the economics of deployment of the application, not necessarily the usability. "Birst has rationalized the infrastructure and re-engineering the IT supply chain, like Home Depot and Walmart has done in their markets," said Peters. @NeilRaden asked how does Birst do the integration of all that messy user data? "You can not turn straw into gold," said Peters. But, Birst does do a reasonable metadata analysis and generates the likely multi-dimensional model, which can then be fine tuned.
Birst differentiates themselves from LucidEra and other BI SaaS vendors by focusing on data integration capabilities. @NeilRaden quipped
Infrastructure for Birst has been built internally. They did not use open-source software since "it is not that good," remarked Peters. Birst uses both row and column oriented relational engines.
Demo time! Schmitz took us on a end-to-end solution scenario. Built a template with 'automatic' data upload, creating a dimensional metadata model. This model will then create keys, etc. The automatic mode is for simple users with simple data, but an advanced mode can be used by a data modeler to handle complex data. Point to your data files, or connect to a relational database, or connect to popular applications like Google Analytics and Salesforce. In 3 minutes, it produced a clean model and set of dashboards of the Northwind database from a zipped copy of an Access database. There is a nSchmitz took us on a tour of various reports/charts flipping through the attributes/measures (facts/dimensions). Sharing of reports/charts is done via folders with customized permissions.
Discussion of future features under NDA...
My Take... Birst does have a value proposition for business users suffering under a weak corporate IT infrastructure...especially based on quick time for deployment, low skill requirements, and low pay-as-you-go cost structure. This implies to companies of any size. Peters remarked, "
Smaller companies have difficult, even complex analytical problems." As wasvtweeted by @NeilRaden, who continued, "The less you know about IT, the more difficult questions you will ask!"
The long-term strategy would be enhanced if there was a better value proposition for the enterprise IT folks. At the moment, there can be a tense relationship. There are several ways to make enterprise IT happy, such as: data integration-as-a-service, dimensional-modeling-as-a-service, report-generation-as-a-service, chart-publishing-as-a-service ... all integrated back into the enterprise data warehouse. I would suggest that we should think of Birst as the front-line troops that capture new territory (unsupported BI applications) that will eventually be blended back into your IT empire. Now that is exciting!
