eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Enterprise business intelligence provider Birst has made its cloud-based analytics service a lot more intuitive for line-of-business employees to use by incorporating new visual discovery capabilities.
Birst Visualizer, launched Dec. 10, is a new feature within the subscription service that adds Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations to reduce time-to-answer on queries. But that’s hardly the whole story.
Visualizer operates on top of Birst’s patented data management platform, which includes an automated data warehouse, built-in ETL (extract, transform, load) and uniform logical business layer, which can be tailored to various user types and roles to visualize accurate business data in terms of dashboards, charts, graphs and other illustrations.
So Birst is now providing self-service BI, whether users’ needs are visual discovery, enterprise reporting, interactive dashboards, advanced ad-hoc analysis or predictive modeling, Birst CEO Brad Peters said.
“We applied consumer design principles to our new Birst Visualizer so that users who aren’t analytics experts—front-line managers, field sales reps and others—can explore enterprise data without hesitation,” Peters said.
San Francisco-based Birst in 2011 launched a SQL-based, columnar database housed in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that works fast and handles large workloads, enabling users to turn previously unused enterprise data into intelligent analytics reports that can immediately improve decision-making at many levels of a company’s management. It is the first cloud-based data analytics service to deploy an in-memory database specifically tuned for analytics, Peters said.
Because it runs in real-time DRAM, and not on hard or solid-state drives, Birst’s analytics are unconstrained by the limits of single-table or associative models used by conventional discovery tools, Peters told eWEEK.
Go here to view a demonstration. For more details on the new service, go here.