Birst, the global leader in Cloud BI, today announced that it has extended its partnership with Amazon Web Services by launching a European-based public cloud offering hosted in Ireland. The partnership enables Birst to offer customers a complete enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) platform in the cloud including rich visualisation and analytical tools as well as automated data warehouse creation that is hosted in Europe.
“With today’s announcement we are able to offer businesses a choice of where their data is hosted – an advantage for our European customers,” said David Gray, Vice President International at Birst. “As companies seek to make data-driven decisions, access to data is significantly changing the business landscape. Organisations are looking to use the assets they have available by leveraging the right tools to make sense of their data. Birst can help customers to manage, manipulate, analyse and present large volumes of data in the cloud,” he continued.
“We are migrating our BI capability to an in-house service based on a cloud-based data warehousing solution, with Birst running on top and handling our main reporting requirements,” explained John Kundert, Head of BI Delivery, Financial Times. “Previously our data analytics teams were responsible for handling all requests but with Birst we will put more of the data in the hands of business teams directly. Day-to-day requests for reports and analytics will be fulfilled by the individuals that need them. This is a significant step forward for us and means data analytics teams are free to concentrate on more complicated reporting requirements like trend analysis, which provide greater value to the entire organisation,” he concluded.
Additionally, Birst announced today that it continues to drive the rapidly expanding market for cloud-based business intelligence in Europe by signing 16 new partners across Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. The company has impressively grown its European customer base within the last year adding companies such as Financial Times, Reckitt Benckiser, Dialogue Communications, Itsu Sushi and EAT.
Finally, Birst has expanded its UK team significantly over the past 12 months. Based at the company’s HQ in Woking, the hires included sales, professional services, customer success managers, partner managers, solution engineers and marketing.
“Cloud BI is becoming more acceptable as a deployment option, with 45% of respondents to Gartner’s BI and analytics platform Magic Quadrant survey (compared with approximately 30% for each of the last four years) saying they would put their mission-critical BI in the cloud. BI vendors with cloud offerings are moving toward meeting critical market requirements for governed business-user-friendly platforms and to deliver strong product functionality, positive customer experiences and high business value to customers. Increasingly, traditional on-premises vendors are also prepared to support cloud BI. This is a significant shift, indicating that 2014 may be a tipping point for cloud adoption as data gravity shifts to the cloud. While most BI vendors now have a cloud strategy, many leaders of BI and analytic initiatives do not have a strategy for how to combine and integrate cloud services,” according to Gartner*.
Birst has continued to deliver numerous innovations throughout the past year to enhance customers’ ability to rapidly gain insight from diverse data sources and better serve business users. The company has introduced:
- Birst Visualizer – provides visual discovery capabilities to the Birst platform, combining Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations to reduce time-to-answer for business users.
- Birst’s Open Connector Framework – allows third parties to create connectors and provides application-level integration for the creation of Solution Accelerators. Solution Accelerators provide pre-built analytics, dashboards and reports including operational analytics for NetSuite and recurring revenue.
- Birst’s integration with SAP HANA – lets organisations take advantage of Birst’s enterprise-calibre analytics capabilities on top of the latest in-memory technology from SAP. By combining the speed of HANA and the analytic power of Birst, customers can analyse more data in more detail and faster than ever before.
*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Rita Sallam, Joao Tapadinhas, Josh Parenteau, Daniel Yuen, Bill Hostmann, February 20, 2014.
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