Big group today for
BIRST full house here in Boulder and on the conference line today. Looks like the trend continues that SaaS based solutions have a great buzz around them. I was fortunate to meet the BIRST team in San Francisco a while back and found the product to be very interesting and robust. The executive team is Ex Siebel, Oracle, Hyperion, Cognos MicroStrategy and SAS people. Strong funding as well from
Sequoia Capital the product was launched in September of 2008 and is serving 1000's of users and they have dozens of customers.
Brad Peters, CEO and Stefan Schmitz, Sr. Dir of Product Mgt are visiting today. The company viability issue came up early today in the wake of Lucidera closing down so we were interested in how the stability of BIRST is being effected. The good news is that they have 1/2 their VC funds still in the bank, a multi-year run rate and expect to go profitable next year.
BIRST is focused on integration, information delivery and analysis and feels they bring a more substantial infrastructure to the market then the remaining SaaS business intelligence competition. I like the aim at the smaller market. They will find better traction with clients that are sub-terabyte in needs and provide BI between the big stack guys and excel spreadsheet BI users in the market.
The interface of the BIRST solution is very elegant and does a good job of leveraging advanced features for web based applications. Overall the features in BIRST seem well positioned to serve the needs of 80% of most BI users I think this is a positive. Its not cluttered with stuff that only the highest end power users
demand but easily delivers the features most users would
need. The ability to dive in and customize is impressive and very intuitive.
We were briefed on future road map for the product and the new features coming down the line will move BIRST forward in a strong way....sorry NDA no more details.
