Brad Peters, BIrst CEO, and Stefan Schmitz, Sr. Director of Product Management, ventured to Boulder, Colorado this morning to meet with the sharp minds at the Boulder BI Brain Trust. The BI Brain Trust is a group of analysts with deep and broad experience in BI, so it’s a very lively, well-informed audience. They definitely put Brad, Stefan, and Birst through their paces, and it looks like Birst was up to the challenge. We hear that there was a full house in Boulder, along with many analysts participating by phone and Twitter.
Here are some interesting comments from the very active Twitter stream.
Please note that some of these have parenthetical comments to fill in missing context:
Birst’s financial strength:
Claudia Imhoff: “Birst is well funded - over half of their funding is still in the bank. May be profitable next year. That is fast!”
Average customer size shows that Birst serves full range of customer sizes:
Richard Hackathorn: “Typically 50 users per customer with the largest customer having around five thousand users.”
Smaller companies have complex BI problems, too, and need powerful BI
Neil Raden: “Brad (Peters, CEO of Birst) is right. Smaller companies have difficult, even complex analytical problems, not just very large companies.”
John Myers: “Birst is for people who aren't [experts at BI and DataWarehousing] or are annoyed with stuff like Microstrategy.”
The Birst approach – automation, better ease of use – fits the needs of many companies
Merv Adrian: “Volume of data and users are important. Skills don't linearly scale with them, even when needs do. That's an opportunity.”
User interface:
Neil Raden: “Very nice UI. Well done.”
Analysts are interested in Birst and the on-demand BI concept
Shawn Rogers: “This Boulder BI Brain Trust hits a new record for Tweets (comments) over 125 and still going. Birst sparked a great conversation and debate today - Nice job Brad!”
Shawn Rogers: “I'm impressed - solid foundation. They will provide a unique value to their prospects.” (Note: punctuation added for clarity.)
