Birst Launches Birst 6; Empowers Business Users to Connect

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 29, 2016) - Birst, the global leader in Cloud BI and Analytics for the Enterprise, today unveiled Birst 6, the next evolution of its networked business analytics platform that empowers business users to connect to a new level of trusted insights.

With Birst 6, business users can transform raw data into connected insights quickly and effortlessly. Connected insights means people can connect their prepared data to a network of analytics, enriching their own insights and those of others throughout the organization via Birst's enterprise-scale, multi-tenant cloud architecture. Only Birst enables people to extend their analytics, data models and visualizations through a seamless, networked integration of data and analytics deployments across their organizations.

The Birst 6 networked business analytics platform will deliver technology capabilities, beginning immediately with connected, end user data preparation (data prep), and throughout 2017. This first release also incorporates machine learning automation features, to make advanced analytics more accessible to a broader audience, and cloud-scale enhancements, to support enterprise-class requirements. Future releases will expand upon these capabilities.

With Birst 6, the company will deliver business analytics that are "Connected," "Smart," "Trusted" and "Enterprise Class."

Connected: Birst Connected Data Prep

Birst's connected data prep experience enables business users to leverage powerful data blending, transformation, and networking capabilities to prepare data for analytics via an intuitive user interface -- all without the need for IT intervention.

Today's self-service data prep tools and desktop-based visualization products are mainly aimed at data-savvy analysts who are already comfortable manipulating data. In addition, these tools have created disconnected silos of data across the enterprise, resulting in inconsistent information and lack of trust in the decision-making process.

The Birst 6 platform eliminates these silos, while enabling everyday business users to easily access and work with trusted data. They can connect their insights to their company's network of analytics, for smarter, confident business decisions. With Birst's Connected Data Prep capabilities, business users can connect, prepare and relate data entirely on their own and regardless of skill.

• Connect: Birst enables business people to access data from multiple sources -- files, spreadsheets, databases, cloud-based applications and more -- with one click and no IT support required. Birst employs modern RESTful connectors so the experience is fast, reliable and reusable. With Birst, companies can eliminate burdensome data feeds that are difficult to manage and promote inconsistent and inaccurate data.
  
  
• Prepare: With Birst Connected Data Prep, business people can cleanse, merge and refine data using an intuitive, visual experience that instantly shows how data is changing with each transformation applied. Drag-and-drop transformations eliminate the need for complicated scripting, and graphical data lineage ensures people can trust what the data means and where it comes from.
  
  
• Relate: Birst creates a network of analytics that connects every part of the organization through trusted insights. With Connected Data Prep, business people can take their prepared data and add it to the network, enriching their insights and those of their colleagues. Additionally, new users can look across their network to find and leverage existing insights. Birst automatically generates an analytics semantic layer that delivers transparent governance at business speed, so companies can make decisions with confidence.
  
  

Smart: Birst Machine Learning Automation

With Birst's Machine Learning Automation, enterprises can extend the benefits of advanced analytics to a broader audience, empowering them with the ability to predict outcomes, so they never miss business opportunities. Smart prediction capabilities in Birst 6 will help business people enhance their analysis by forecasting, using trend lines, with just one click.

Birst's Machine Learning Automation delivers faster time-to-insight, with less human intervention. Machine Learning Automation capabilities are embedded into Birst's new Connected Data Prep experience, including intelligent defaults for application connectors, usage-pattern discovery of data sources, smart profiling for join recommendations across the Birst network of analytics, and cross-data source sampling for rapid exploration.

Enterprise Class: Birst's cloud-scale architecture

Birst's cloud-scale architecture delivers world-class performance on top of a modern, multi-tenant platform that, unlike traditional solutions, has no single bottleneck to hinder performance.

Birst 6 will deliver performance and scalability improvements to support even larger data volumes and concurrency levels. These enhancements include improved data loading and processing speeds, faster response times for queries, visualizations, and dashboards, and Big Data parallel processing for data refinement and transformations. Birst 6 also will introduce data and transformation lineage across the Birst network of analytics.

Supporting Quotes:

• "Desktop discovery and data prep tools have fallen short. They are powerful for dedicated data analysts, but they rarely empower everyday decision makers to make smarter decisions. Further, they have created data silos that stall decision making. With Birst 6, we can finally overcome these data silos and move data analytics out of its ivory tower and into the hands of business users, resulting in smart, reliable decisions and better business outcomes." - Rob Saker, Chief Data Officer, Crossmark
  
  
• "Birst's networked approach to analytics is in tune with the growing need to tap data from myriad on-premises and cloud-based sources and then deliver or embed insights wherever they are needed in a flexible, cloud-enabled way. In fact, Constellation Research estimates that by 2020, at least 60% of the data that organizations consider to be mission-critical will live outside the four walls of the enterprise."* - Doug Henschen, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
  
  
  • *From the Constellation Research report, "Innovating With Cloud BI and Analytics: Three Imperatives," November 2016.
    
    
• "Birst's approach to BI and analytics unlocks the collective intelligence of business leaders and data, securely connecting insights in real time, so everyone can work with trusted data to make smarter decisions. The introduction of Birst 6 cements our position as a pioneering technology that connects business users to a new level of trusted insights. With Birst's network of analytics, you avoid disconnected silos of information that lead to inconsistent and unreliable data. - Junaid Saiyed, Vice President, Product Management and Engineering, Birst
  
  

Subsequent releases of Birst 6, in 2017, will continue to deliver additional machine learning automation capabilities, as well as performance and scalability enhancements.

To learn more about Birst 6, click here.

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About Birst

Birst is the world's most advanced networked business analytics platform. Organizations can now achieve a new level of trusted insight and decision making by connecting their data and people via a network of analytics services. Birst scales from individuals to the enterprise in a manner that is smarter, more connected, and more scalable than any previous analytics and business intelligence platform. Learn more at www.birst.com and join the conversation @BirstBI.