Today, Birst announced the availability of concurrent user pricing, Concurrent user pricing solves the challenge of delivering greater insight to a large number of potential users in an affordable way. A number of analysts that we spoke to regarded concurrent user pricing as one of the most requested features that customers have. However, BI companies wouldn't give it to them. Until now.
With concurrent pricing, organizations acquire licenses for the desired number of users that can access the solution at any one time. This means that a company only licenses the number of users active on the system, rather than the maximum number of named users who could potentially use the solution.
This is not the way that Big BI does business. Traditional on-premise business intelligence (BI) software solutions operate solely on a “named user” basis. The software is licensed to a particular, identified user and installed on their computer. The customer pays whether that person is actually using the software or not. In this situation, larger customers often end up paying for “shelf-ware,” software that is not actually used, and not everyone who could benefit from BI gets access to it. It's a lose-lose for the customer.
Many people can benefit from BI, but not everybody gets access to it
BI usage is typically around 8% of an organization, a surprisingly small figure. There are a number of things holding back the penetration rate of BI - cost and complexity of traditional deployments being the two leading issues. It's simply too expensive and too complicated to extend BI throughout an organization, when using traditional pricing models.
Concurrent user pricing - bringing BI to more people by lowering cost hurdles
Concurrent user pricing helps large organizations clear the pricing hurdle. In the old model, if you have 10,000 users who might benefit from the system, you had to pay for 10,000 licenses. This was simply too expensive. However, what if those users only used the system infrequently? Only 1,000 were on the system at any one time? Concurrent user pricing lets you pay for just those 1,000 open seats. Now 10,000 people get the benefit, while the company only pays for 1,000 open seats.
Birst is able to easily offer concurrent user pricing because it is an on-demand business intelligence solution. Since users access the solution over the internet, it's easy to see how many users are on the system at any given time. Traditional on-premise software can't do this, since the software has to be loaded on individual machines in order to be used.
On-demand BI - lowering the implementation complexity hurdle
The other hurdle to implementing BI broadly throughout an organization is the complexity of traditional solutions themselves. Extending to more users and meeting their ongoing analysis needs can be incredibly demanding of IT time and resources, due to the complexity of their systems. Birst is a fully integrated BI solution that is highly scalable. So if you want to add 100 more users, you can easily add 100 more users. If those users add new data, that's also easily done. Initial implementations are often done in 1/3rd the time and for 1/3rd the cost of traditional solutions. And with Birst's ease of use, those users can run analysis and reporting themselves, without over-reliance on IT.
Concurrent user pricing- expanding the market and delivering better value to customers
One journalist that we spoke with said that traditional BI vendors also doesn't like concurrent user pricing because it "leaves money on the table." Why ask a customer to pay for only 1,000 licenses when they have 10,000 potential users? Just make them pay for all 10,000. This doesn't pan out in the real world, however. Organizations simply decide that they won't pay that much. They'll only pay for 8% of users to get BI. Concurrent user pricing actually expands the market, by making BI affordable and easy enough to deliver it to to people who didn't get it before. It's capturing parts of the market that were locked out by traditional BI vendors.
Concurrent user pricing - it's just another way that Birst is focused on delivering a great BI experience for the customer.
