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The Birst BI iPad Business Analytics Tablet App has cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) analytics dashboards. Birst says App-based, subscription-model data analytics is faster and costs less versus on-site installations. IBM-SPSS cloud computing analytics, the SAS analytics cloud solution and KnowledgeCLOUD analytics from Angoss Software are also available. Wynn White, Birst’s V.P of Worldwide Marketing, talks about Birst’s cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) analytics platform.

Question 2: What does Birst do? And for how long have you been in business?

Mr. White: Birst provides an agile business analytics platform that addresses the full analytic needs of an organization—everything from the underlying data consolidation, aggregation, and its ongoing management through to the discovery of that data via dashboards, reports, ad hoc queries, and mobile delivery. It is not a simple charting engine for one or two data sources, nor does it assume that IT had already built a data infrastructure ready for analysis. It gives an organization the ability to transform raw data into analysis-ready information, empowering business users to make meaningful business decisions.

Birst was founded in 2005.

Question 3: Can you provide links to one or two videos that talk about Birst’s business analytics products/services?

Question 4: And what about webinars and whitepapers? Can you provide links to one of each that you think every business analytics professional simply must see?

Birst, Business Analytics and the Cloud
Question 5: Your website states that “Birst delivers the industry’s first comprehensive business analytics suite available in the Cloud or on premise behind the corporate firewall”. What does the Cloud bring to business analytics anyway? Better performance? More complex data analysis? Faster sharing of analytical results? More effective data privacy protection?

Mr. White: Cloud delivery offers users a more consumable App—available anywhere, on demand BI solution. Also, the business model is often times more advantageous to organizations: a pay as you go model, no large up-front cost, OPEX vs. CAPEX. But as described in Question #1 above, it’s more about designing and building the product for Cloud or a SaaS model where much of the benefit lies (see above for explanation of the value).

Question 6: What types of data can Birst’s Cloud business analytics solution be used on? Social media? Point-of-sale (POS)?

Mr. White: Yes, Birst supports social media or POS data as well as operational data from ERP, CRM, RDBMS’ and Big Data from Hadoop.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, this is core to our value proposition. We have ETL capabilities that put data from numerous sources into a star-schema datawarehouse under the covers. A semantic layer sits atop of this.

Question 7: What about a predictive model – can a business analyst develop a predictive model, view the results, and then deploy it within the Birst Cloud environment?

Mr. White: Birst allows Designers to create linear regression models, but more advanced predictive modeling requires professional services to implement.

The Birst Mobile for iPad App
Question 8: There’s a Birst mobile for the iPad App, I understand. Please talk about how it works? Can analytics be viewed in real-time? And are we just talking raw, pre-canned reports or can users actually roll through data like they could on, say, a desktop or server version of an IBM-Cognos data cube?

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