Birst Announces Birst 4, The Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite

"Birst 4 is an affordable, fast, and comprehensive solution for companies who want to deliver the benefits of BI to more people in their organization," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "With Birst 4, companies can quickly and easily achieve a comprehensive BI solution at a cost that is reasonable for deploying to entire executive, sales, marketing, finance, and operations teams. With Birst 4, the goal of Pervasive BI is easily within reach for far more organizations."

Like enterprises, even small and midsize organizations can have complex BI needs. Birst 4 meets the needs of the most demanding business intelligence environments by expanding upon Birst's automated, integrated business intelligence to help companies along three main areas:

  --  Any Data Anywhere
      - Birst Live Access
      - Birst Unified Metadata Model
      - Birst Cloud Connectors
  --  Greater Control and Capability
      - Advanced ETL Services
      - Enhanced Administration and Catalog Management
      - Birst Reporting Services
      - Birst Alerts and Exception Reports
      - Birst Application Templates, including Birst for Salesforce.com
  --  Empowering the Business User
      - Smart Dashboards
      - Drag and Drop Pivot Tables

The key features from each of these areas are:

--  Birst Live Access
    The newest addition to Birst Data Services, Birst Live Access allows
    organizations to make direct use of pre-existing data warehouses,
    datamarts, or local databases, leveraging Birst's advanced analytical
    capabilities without having to upload data.  Data stays securely behind the
    firewall, but can be analyzed "in the cloud" with Birst, as well as
    analyzed in combination with data from other uploaded sources, such as
    spreadsheets or uploaded databases.  Birst Live Access allows sophisticated
    organizations to make the most of existing data resources without having to
    upload information to the cloud.

--  Birst Advanced ETL Services
    Extending Birst's automated analytical data store functionality, Birst
    Advanced ETL Services allows organizations to create very sophisticated and
    layered data transformations that traditionally have required complex and
    expensive on-premise ETL tools. Fully integrated into Birst's Unified
    Metadata Model, complex transformations are far easier to create and faster
    to deploy, and it's far easier to ensure metadata consistency.

--  Birst Reporting Services
    Birst provides a fully integrated reporting environment that includes pixel
    perfect reporting, operational reporting, banded reporting, alerts, and
    operational, real-time and exception reports.  In traditional BI solutions,
    each of these elements is often provided separately and requires
    integration.  Birst is the only SaaS vendor to provide fully functional
    report authoring and distribution services.

--  Smart Dashboards
    The upgraded Flex dashboards now offer business users even greater
    capability to explore data trends and discover answers to critical business
    questions entirely on their own, without any reliance on IT or specialized
    business analysts.  Advanced filtering, drill-down capability, and "drag
    and drop" controls put answers at business users' fingertips, without
    coding.
    

"Birst 4 is a major breakthrough for Birst and its customers," said Kevin Farrell, President of Fillmore Technologies, a Birst partner. "Just last year, Birst launched the first automated, integrated BI solution. Now, Birst revolutionizes BI yet again by providing a Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite at a price that is affordable across the business spectrum. The interest that we see in Birst has never been higher, and existing customers can't wait for the upgrade."

Birst 4 will be available in mid-November. Existing Birst customers will be upgraded automatically. Interested companies can contact Birst for a free trial by contacting sales@birst.com. More information on Birst 4 can be found by going to www.birst.com/birst4.

About Birst

Birst(TM) is the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions. Through its Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite, Birst brings the benefits of fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is the winner of the Red Herring 100 Award 2009, the TDWI Best Practices Award 2009, and the Web Award for Software Standard of Excellence.

For more information, please visit www.birst.com.