Birst

The Business User Ascendant - the 2011 BI Magic Quadrant Report

2011-03-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

This year’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was a very exciting read, with multiple trends and comments worthy of note. One of the biggest developments was the recognition of the needs of the business user, with the business side emerging as a buyer and significant influencer of business intelligence solutions and decisions.

Ease of use becomes prime- for the first time

This year, companies reported that ease of use was more important than functionality as a primary buying criterion. This really recognizes two things – first, that many solutions have achieved a satisfactory breadth and depth of functionality, so that there is no killer feature that will drive a purchasing decision. This is not to say that all solutions calling themselves BI are the same -- Tableau, QlikTech, and Microstrategy all have very different offerings as a visualization tool, in-memory midmarket tool, and full on-premise enterprise analytical engine, respectively -- but that multiple vendors may have the combination of features that meet any given customer’s needs. Deciding among the short list will not be determined by features alone. At Birst, we see this clearly, from the number of times that we're in a short list vendor showdown with the same enterprise class BI companies, over and over again.

Second, the importance of ease of use recognizes that business intelligence is breaking out of the ivory tower and becoming more democratic – it is not just in the hands of business analysts who work for IT, but in the hands of business users who are using it to make day to day decisions. And the business user wants a faster, easier, more flexible solution. This is a powerful and positive development, since it means that fact-based decision-making is becoming more widespread, and effective business impact can happen through timely, accurate insight.

Business and IT work together on a “portfolio approach”

In the past few years, IT organizations have often been focused on vendor standardization and consolidation, with the belief that this will streamline their organization and make BI implementations more manageable. This standardization goal is often at odds with the business user’s desire for ease of use and flexibility, since the traditional vendors don’t necessarily have the most modern solutions that combine power and ease of use.

So business users have been striking out on their own, buying data discovery tools or departmental BI solutions using SaaS vendors. As a result, IT and business have had to achieve a balance of power, so that the gap is bridged between the different buying centers, approaches, and use cases. A portfolio of options for tackling business intelligence challenges has emerged, ranging from simple data visualization to SaaS BI to traditional on-premise BI.

Embracing new, modern vendors

The Gartner report further points out that traditional BI providers have been slow to embrace the business user challenge and develop the new delivery methods or provide the ease of use that business users are looking for. To achieve these goals and appease business users, companies have to reach beyond traditional vendors to pure play providers offering visualization, in-memory, or SaaS BI.

Up next – Gartner’s new coverage of SaaS BI.

Dreamforce - cloudstorms, monkeys, and overheard

2010-12-14T09:58:00.000-08:00

We're still recovering from a fantastic Dreamforce 2010 here at the Birst headquarters. We had over three times the number of people stopping by to chat about business intelligence this year, which is a great validation of how important powerful analytics are to salesforce.com customers.

There were so many clouds announced at Dreamforce 2010 that it started raining.
The new cloud announcements during Marc Benioff's keynote seemed to have a cloud seeding effect. The energy and enthusiasm of the Dreamforce 2010 attendees stayed at a high level, though, and they seemed to revel in the cloudy weather.

Thanks to everyone who came by the Birst booth - sorry we ran out of monkeys. Here's how you can still get one.
The monkeys ended up being more popular than we expected, much to the chagrin of Birst employees who were hoping that there would be leftovers to take home. If you missed your monkey, just arrange a sales call with one of our sales teams, and we'll be happy to give you a monkey as a thank you. You can reach our sales team at 1 (866) 940-1496 or you can send us an email from our contact form - click here.

Overheard at Dreamforce
Dreamforce attendees are a fun crowd, and we heard a lot of amusing, enlightening, and thoughtful things over the course of the week. Here are a few of them.

"No, really, I'm the Microsoft CTO." - inebriated Microsoft employee, trying to crash the Birst private party on Monday night

"You can never have too much flair." - enthusiastic Dreamforce attendee, sporting no less than 12 salesforce.com event buttons, including "Repeat Attender"

"I was a Business Objects SI for years. But on-premise BI is nowhere now." - software systems integrator who stopped by the Birst booth to strike up a partnership conversation

"I wonder if they have cow socks, too." - attendee considering getting the type of socks that Marc Benioff was wearing for the Tuesday morning keynote

"I think I should go play the lottery now." - Dreamforce attendee who picked up an orange Birst bag to carry the Microsoft Xbox Kinect that she won from Coupa and the iPad that she won from another Dreamforce sponsor

"Hey, you, get offa my cloud!" - attendee who was wondering when we would all have clouds, or if there should just be one cloud

Thanks again for a great Dreamforce 2010, we're looking forward to seeing you again next year!

Bringing SaaS BI to Dreamforce 2010

2010-11-30T09:42:00.000-08:00

Just a few days left until Dreamforce 2010 and the excitement is building here at Birst HQ. Thousands of giveaways (of two different kinds!) are stacked up in our offices, thousands of collateral pieces are being printed, and our engineers are perfecting their sales analytics demos.

Here's where you can find Birst at Dreamforce, and how to make the most of what we'll have to offer.

Stop by Birst booth #1000 to see the latest and greatest in sales analytics and BI
Birst has a roomy booth this year, where you can check out our sales analytics, pipeline analysis, and general business intelligence demos. You can also pick up some helpful datasheets and whitepapers while you're there.

Get some free Birst stuff
You have two hands, so we have a giveaway for each of them. One will be very helpful for you at Dreamforce - practically everyone was asking for one last year-- so stop by early to pick it up during the Monday night reception. You'll want to carry it around all week. The other is soft, furry, and fun, and you'll want to make some space for it in your luggage. There are 20,000 people coming to Dreamforce and we only made a few thousand of each, so stop by early to get yours. Once they're gone, they're gone.

Get a free "Pipeline Stress Test" for your sales forecast
As a 5 Star rated AppExchange partner and leading provider of sales analytics for salesforce.com customers, Birst is offering a free "Pipeline Stress Test" to Dreamforce attendees. The Pipeline Stress Test quickly analyzes a company's sales performance and provides an accurate, historically based forecast of how the current quarter will perform. A $3,000 value, the Pipeline Stress Test will be free to Dreamforce attendees. Interested salesforce.com customers can stop by the Birst booth to sign up.

Help raise money for the construction of the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital - with just your signature!
Birst also invites you to show their support of children's health and the new UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital by stopping by the "UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital" booth, Booth #1215. For every attendee signature, Birst and its partners will provide a $5 donation towards the construction of the new children's hospital, for a total of up to $90,000. For more info on how you can help, click here.

We're looking forward to seeing you at Dreamforce!

Birst has got the Mo - Aspect the latest customer to tell the world why they picked Birst

2010-10-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

The story about the value and power of SaaS BI is becoming louder and louder each day. And it's not just Birst that's cheering. It's our customers and partners, too.

We're honored that eleven customers and partners have recently announced to the world why they picked Birst as their SaaS BI provider. And that's just in the past few months.

Here's our Summer and Autumn 2010 "customer pride" roll call:

Aspect

Birst's On-Demand Business Intelligence Solution Helps Aspect Enhance Ability to Forecast Business Performance
read more

PlusOne

Plus One Selects Birst’s On-Demand BI Solution to Help Clients Further Reduce Healthcare Costs
read more

Xactly

Xactly Chooses Birst to Provide Single View of Key Operational Data from Multiple SaaS Applications
read more

EMT

EMT Partners with Birst for Substance Abuse Reporting for California Counties
read more

PeopleAnswers

PeopleAnswers Selects Birst and Cervello for HR Analytics to Increase Clients’ ROI
read more

Massive Analytic

Massive Analytic and Birst Partner to Bring On-Demand Business Intelligence to EMEA
read more

Traiana

Traiana Selects Birst to Increase Insight into Sales and Professional Services Pipelines
read more

Mohawk

Mohawk Employees to Use Birst's Reporting and Analysis to Make Better, More-Informed Decisions
read more

Altair

Altair Uses Birst to Help Clients Improve Marketing Effectiveness and Customer Profitability
read more

KYDEX

KYDEX, LLC Speeds and Enhances Sales Reporting Using Birst's On-Demand BI Solution
read more

NPD Group

The NPD Group Selects Birst to Improve Sales Operations Insight and Efficiency
read more

We're very grateful for their public support of Birst and the power of SaaS BI. To find out more about SaaS Business Intelligence, check out the Birst "BI 101" section of the Birst.com website. Click here.

Confirming the Case for SaaS BI

2010-09-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Aberdeen Research Group has recently released a new report on SaaS Business Intelligence (SaaS BI), “Fast, Affordable, Agile – The Case for SaaS BI.”

The results confirm the benefits of SaaS BI – faster decisions, lower IT costs, and more pervasive use of business intelligence.

For example, companies that use SaaS BI are 50% more likely to have self-service BI users than organizations that adopt traditional, on-premise BI. The implications of this are significant. That’s a lot less people lining up outside the overworked IT guy’s door, hoping to get new reports. And that’s a lot more people able to come up with quick answers themselves, so that they can take action. It all adds up to a more proactive organization, doing more with less.

A couple more of Aberdeen’s takeaways, quoted directly from the report press release:

SaaS BI opens up business intelligence to new user populations -- In addition to helping small organizations overcome the initial cost and IT burden of traditional BI approaches, several factors are driving adoption of on-demand BI in large organizations, including: tight budgets, long, resource-intensive deployments for conventional approaches and diverse needs of many workgroups (tied at 38%). Aberdeen adds, "the single biggest factor is that conventional BI tools are simply too complex and hard to use," (58%) which it views as "a clear indication that the relative simplicity of SaaS BI tools presented via a browser is a strong driver of adoption."

SaaS changes the economics of BI deployments -- Aberdeen's study notes several economic advantages of SaaS BI over on-premise alternatives, including more flexible pay-as-you-go licenses and subscriptions, faster time to value, eliminating the expense of hardware investments, and availability of pre-packaged key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that "can significantly help in cutting the time and cost involved."

SaaS encourages agile and flexible BI solutions -- Aberdeen concludes, "a number of capabilities that contribute to agility are related to self-service business intelligence -- the ability for business users to find the information they need without repeated trips to the IT department for assistance."

In a nutshell, with SaaS BI, more people get insight, BI costs less, you see value more quickly, and your solution is more responsive to your needs.

This allows new organizations to get BI that didn’t have it before, as analyst David White noted, "SaaS BI fosters self-service in many ways. It provides increased ability to automate the generation and distribution of reports, drill-down capabilities and the creation of automated alerts. It's also clear that Software-as-a-Service is finding favor with new user populations. Smaller organizations that need a step up from the humble spreadsheet and larger organizations that need to provide BI to underserved employees are both driving adoption."

For a free copy of the report, click here.

Birst is a co-sponsor of this SaaS BI report. We hope that you enjoy it. Get it soon. The free download expires on October 31, 2010.

Feeling the stress of the quarter? Time for the Birst Pipeline Stress Test, free from Birst.

2010-08-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

The quarter is nearly halfway over and September 30th is rapidly approaching. You can see your current pipeline in your SFA solution, but how can you really know if you will make your forecast? Some deals will drop out, some new deals will come in, and Salesforce.com is only telling you what a bunch of combined guesses add up to.

Want a more reliable predictor? It's time to take the Birst Pipeline Stress Test.

The Stress Test gives you greater confidence in your forecast, since it tells you where you stand based on your actual historical results, not guesses. The Birst Pipeline Stress Test Dashboard lets you know:

What the historical odds are that deals at each stage will close or progress.
A prediction of where the current quarter will end up, based on historical probabilities.
A forecast of what proportion of deals will slip into the next quarter.
A prediction of how new deals will likely affect current quarter pipeline.

The Stress Test helps you move beyond hunches to gain confidence in your current revenue trajectory. It's also fast - so that you can prioritize resources and maximize the probability of success for this quarter.

And it's free.

The Birst Pipeline Stress Test consists of three easy steps:

Apply. Birst will check to ensure that you have the information available to complete the Stress Test and both organizations will complete confidentiality agreements to protect your information and interests.
Birst runs the analysis for you. We run the Pipeline Stress Test on your current Salesforce.com account. This process requires only a couple of days to complete.
Review your results. Birst reviews the forecast dashboard with you and shows you the actions that you should take to secure your quarterly sales outcome.

And did I mention that it's free? Start to finish takes only 3 days, with no other commitments and no crazy IT requirements. Getting started is easy.

The Birst Pipeline Stress Test is only available for a limited time. To see where you stand for this quarter, sign up for the Stress Test today.

The stress test shows the value of Birst's greater Sales Analytics solution and shows how SaaS business intelligence can provide rapid, actionable results.

Delivering great BI to more of your organization - Birst announces concurrent user pricing

2010-07-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

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.

There's an app for that -- get your Birst reports on smartphones

2010-07-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

Now that you are getting your free bumper for your iPhone 4 and don't have to worry about losing reception when you hold your phone with your left hand, we wanted to let you know that you can now get your key Birst reports on your iPhone. Or your BlackBerry. Or your Android phone. In fact, any smartphone with a modern browser should be capable of displaying your Birst reports.

And your iPad, too.

So if you're on the commuter train, waiting in line at Starbucks, in the conference room of a major customer prospect, or on the factory floor, you can get the reports that you need, with the most recent information, no matter where you are.

Now you know, wherever you are.

Key features include:

The latest reports, automatically — Get the most recent reports, so you can see the exact status of the business and have up-to-date conversations with employees, partners, and customers.

Interactive analysis— Quickly and easily browse reports and dashboards to see exactly the information you need, drilling down interactively to any level of detail.

Real time data access – Analyze your data in real time. Customers using Birst Live Access, which directly accesses on-premise databases and can query data on-the-fly, have access to real-time data.

Alerts — Track exceptions and receive email alerts. If any critical business rule or threshold level is crossed, be immediately alerted and interact with Birst to diagnose and address the key drivers of the issue. For example, know when inventory has fallen below acceptable levels.

Easily filter results, to see just what you need.

Fully secure. Birst Mobile is password protected and HTTPS, so only the report owners can see their Birst reports.

Switching to a new phone? No problem. Phones change rapidly, so users switch their phones frequently. With on-device BI solutions, this is a big hassle. Business users have to surrender their phones to IT, assuming that the software will work with the new device. And since many users are all switching phones at the same time, the wait can take a while. Since Birst is an on-demand solution, upgrading phones is not an issue for IT or for the business user. Simply log on to Birst using your new phone. As long as the phone has a modern browser, your reports will be there. Birst makes mobile BI easy and powerful.

Bringing BI to midsize businesses - the necessary partnership between IT and business

2010-05-25T13:40:00.001-07:00

Midsize organizations often struggle with transitioning to business intelligence. As the business has grown, business users feel the increasing pain of reporting and analysis (or the lack of reporting) as data volume expands, the sources of information multiply, and achieving even basic business insight becomes more complex and time consuming. Despite this pain, they don't often understand that there is a better solution than cobbling together Excel spreadsheets or struggling with Microsoft Access.

The IT team understands the value of business intelligence, but is often pulled in multiple directions and doesn't have time to explain BI to business users, or engage in a lengthy, complex traditional BI deployment.

Here are some process and technology tips on achieving a happy outcome for all - a partnership between business and BI that gets reporting needs addressed, makes effective use of IT's precious resources, and ensures that the organization has a solution that will continue to serve its needs as the business changes.

IT makes the case -- the business case

IT can ride to the rescue of the business when it can speak in the language of the business user. So to move BI from the "nice to have" column to the "necessity" column, IT needs to make the case that BI is mission critical, as Cindi Howson points out in her recent InformationWeek article.

Give the pain a name and an intensity. At the doctor's office, a nurse often shows you a pain classification chart, from smiley face (not painful at all) to a crying, frowning face (excruciating pain). This helps gauge what kind of solution is necessary. When kicking off a BI project, making a pain assessment can be helpful. For each department, calculate what it costs analysts to do a number of business processes manually versus the cost of automating it with business intelligence. This doesn't have to be overly involved - the labor costs of manual calculation alone are often compelling enough to consider BI.

Identify the key pain points. Just like in acupressure massage, you don't need to treat the whole body for pain, just the key points. Gather the key metrics from each affected group, to ensure that you're answering the right questions - the ones that bedevil them every week. Avoid scope creep by focusing on the current set of desired metrics from manual calculation, and expand only a percentage from there.

Don't solve for everything at once. Massage the critical pain points.

So this is what relief looks like! Imagining a BI-powered future can be a leap for some business users, who may not like the current system, but are comfortable with it. Marshal some statistics on how BI can improve decision-making and business results, without requiring large expense or deployment times. For example, Aberdeen is offering a free report for a limited time about the TCO of Business Intelligence. There are some great stats in here. For your free copy, click here.

Coming together on BI strategy

Once the business sees the potential value of BI, IT and business need to work together on creating a cohesive BI strategy for their particular case. This is a key piece, as IT executive acknowledged at the recent Gartner Business Intelligence conference. Main topics for discussion include:

Key phases of the project and the goals for each
Ensuring user adoption through training, deliverable requirements, and business process/culture
Ongoing BI governance

Make sure that your solution meets the needs today and is future proof for tomorrow

Once the business case is made and the strategy is set, the last component is the technology. This is often an insurmountable hurdle for midsize businesses, since traditional BI solutions are often too expensive, complex, and IT resource intensive to be feasible.

However, new BI solutions can help to overcome these hurdles and deliver on the BI requirements and strategy. The three options available to the midsize organization are on-demand business intelligence, in-memory analytics, and open source BI tool technology. While all three are vastly more affordable than traditional BI, on-demand BI offers the most flexibility to meet increasing complexity and scale as a business grows.

On-demand business intelligence is faster to deploy than traditional solutions, often in weeks instead of months. It's also more affordable. As a monthly subscription that is only a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions, companies can avoid large upfront costs and only use what they need at that particular time. It also provides superior flexibility and scalability. There is no additional hardware to buy or IT resources required as the solution grows, and many solution, like Birst, can handle any data source that you throw at it, so it is extensible to multiple departments in your organization.

With the right mix of IT/business partnership, strategy, and technology, midsize organizations can finally achieve the business insight that they need.

The importance of 350 - and doing something about it

2010-04-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Happy Earth Day. For today's environmental dashboard series, we're focusing on one number in particular: 350.

350 is a "tipping point" number. It is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Below 350 ppm, the climate continues to be hospitable to the lives that we enjoy living - lives with comfortable temperatures, mild weather, arctic ice, predictable ocean flows, and happy coral reefs teeming with life.

Above 350ppm, there are very negative consequences - extreme weather, droughts in some places, unpredictable ocean flows, dying coral reefs, diminishing ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, the loss of Pacific Island nations, and so on.

The bad news: we're already at 387ppm, well past 350.

The good news: we can still do something about it. Like someone who's just been told that they've put on 20 pounds too many for good health, we can start working towards diminishing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Hey, where did this 350 come from, anyway?
Up until late 2007, an upper limit number didn't really exist. There were some guesses, such as doubling the amount of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from the Industrial Revolution days, and calling that it. After seeing the dramatic reduction in Arctic Ice during the summer of 2007, a number of scientists decided to take a more thorough approach.

NASA's Jim Hansen, along with a team including Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, and Valerie Masson-Delmotte, among others, took a close look at historic data and determined that 350 is the safe upper limit. The report that they produced is publicly available, you can download it here. If you find the technical terms a bit confusing, check out the really compelling summary on the last few pages.

So what do we do about that?
There's a lot that everyone can do, both as individuals and as nations. As the United States, we're in the best position to do something, since we're both one of the largest energy consumers and one of the largest emissions producers.

As an individual

Be conscientious about energy consumption. Not only turning off unused lights and limiting unnecessary electricity use, but also reconsidering things like your daily commute. Perhaps the bus does take 15 minutes longer, but it may be worth it.

Consider the climate impact of the goods and services that you consume. In the Bay Area, more and more restaurants are indicating on their menus which options are environmentally friendly. It doesn't mean that you always have to choose those options, but awareness can often drive action.

Offset your carbon usage. Organizations like CarbonFund.org make it easy for you to purchase carbon credits to offset your energy usage and emissions. I offset the average carbon usage for my family today.

As a country
It's going to take concerted effort to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to within the safe range. That calls for national solutions in addition to local and individual ones. Here are some ways to get involved:

Check out 350.org 350.org is a helpful site with information about the 350 movement and how you can take action.

For more info, here are some great resources:

The EPA's Earth Day site. The EPA is celebrating its 40th Anniversary as well.
Bill McKibben's website. McKibben is a journalist who has done some great work on explaining the climate crisis and how to move forward. He has a new book out called EAARTH.
Michael Pollan's website. Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" revived interest in local, organic foods, which helps both health and environment.
NASA's Earth Day site. Glorious photos, great information.

Ode to the blue bin - America's wastestream and what we're doing about it

2010-04-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

Continuing our 40th Anniversary of Earth Day series, here's an executive look at what happens to all of our stuff after we think that we're done with it.

We have a lot of stuff, we have a lot of trash
Along with the rise in American disposable income and wealth over the past century has come a rise in what we dispose of. As the Environmental Protection Agency calculates it, the amount of solid waste generated in a year has gone from 88 million tons in 1960 to nearly 250 million tons today.

And it's not just because there are more Americans. The amount of trash generated each day by an American has gone from 2.7 pounds to 4.5 pounds in the same period. In a year, that adds up to 0.8 tons per person.

Source: EPA

Hey, you can see our trash from space!
There are two man-made constructions that you can see easily from space. One is the Great Wall of China. The second is the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island,the repository of New York City trash since it opened in 1948. It's 2,200 acres of fun, rising to 225 feet in some spots. Now turned into a park, it looks rather pretty now, but I wouldn't go digging too deep.

We are running out of landfills, however, for all of our trash. From 1979 to 1995, the number of landfills dropped by 84%. Landfills are closing at the rate of 1 per day, according to the Clean Air Council.

Source: NYC Dept of Planning

What is all this stuff?
The majority of what we throw out is made up of paper, followed by yard trimmings, food scraps, and plastics.

Source: EPA

Seen in another way, a lot of what goes into the waste stream is -- packaging. That's your aluminum can, your disposable grocery bag, your takeout food container. We do love convenience. According to the Clean Air Council, Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. Americans toss out enough paper and plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times.

2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown out every hour.

And that's just the small stuff. Every day, 20,000 American cars and 4,000 trucks and buses are disposed of.

The good news - we can recycle a lot of this, and we are doing more and more of it
Americans now recycle about 83 million tons of discarded material a year. This is a huge growth since the early 1980's. About 1/3rd of waste is now headed to the recycler.

In 1980, 89% of all waste ended up in a landfill. Today, it's only 54%. Recycling, composting, and incineration take care of the rest.

Recycling has a huge impact on reducing energy use and emissions. The 83 million tons of waste recycled last year is equivalent to reducing 182 million metric tons from our environment, comparable to the greenhouse gas emissions from over 33 million cars. It also save the equivalent of over 10 billion gallons of gasoline.

There's still more we can do
Awareness, recycling programs, and legislation have all helped to increase recycling rates. However, there's still more that can be done. While almost all auto batteries are recycled (a great example of adherence to the law), more recycling of personally used products, like cans, glass containers, and plastic containers can be done. The following chart from the EPA shows that only 28% of glass containers are recycled, and only 48% of aluminum cans.

Every can important
According to the Clean Air Council, recycling a single aluminum can saves as much energy as if that can were half full of gasoline.

That's equivalent to 18 oz. of gasoline, right there.

So as you gear up for Earth Day tomorrow, please take a moment to think about your 4.5 pounds of trash, and recycle as much as you can.

Energy - the ups, the downs, the benefits of being Japanese

2010-04-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Today, for our 40th Anniversary of Earth Day series, let's take a quick look at energy usage and its implications with a series of charts.

As Americans, we're lucky.
We have ample access to multiple types of energy sources, and we make use of it. According to the World Bank, the average American uses nearly 4 times as much energy as the average World citizen. That goes to the comfortable modern lifestyle of gasoline-powered transportation, heated homes, air conditioners, electronic devices, etc.

More energy usage gives us a longer life.
If you take a look at electricity use versus lifespan, the Japanese are both lucky enough to have ample access to energy, but also efficient enough to squeeze the most lifespan out of it. Again, as Americans, we're lucky. We use a lot of energy, and we have a respectable lifespan, as well. Modern healthcare (powered by energy), labor saving devices like dishwashers, washing machines, etc. all help us out and help us to live longer.

Source: Global Energy Network Institute

But this energy comes from some "dirty" sources
Powering our energy-rich lifestyle are three major sources: petroleum, coal, and natural gas.

And not all of our energy suppliers are our friends.
Most of our imported natural gas comes from Canada, with whom we're pretty friendly (except for during Olympic hockey matches). Petroleum, however, is another matter. The US imported over 60% of it's oil in 2007. After those friendly Canadians, the next largest exporter was Saudi Arabia- whose ruling class is generally friendly to us, but it is also home to many of the people who brought down the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Venezuela and Nigeria, also not very friendly to us, also exported a large amount to the US. This fact causes energy security and national security-concerned people to seek out alternative sources of energy, preferably ones that we can produce entirely in our home country.

Another reason to look for alternate energy sources - carbon dioxide emissions
Since Americans use four times as much energy as the average world citizen, we also emit four times as much carbon dioxide, according to the World Bank. Carbon dioxide is what's known as a "greenhouse gas" - it collects in the atmosphere and is thought to be driving the elevation in temperature that we showed on the blog yesterday.

Transportation and electric power - the biggest drivers of carbon dioxide
Here in the western states of the US, the major carbon dioxide producers/energy consumers are transportation activities and electric power.

Source: Sightline.org

Walking beats the bus, which beats the Prius, which beats the car, which. . .
Since transportation is a huge contributor to energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions, it's often the primary target of conservation and alternative energy campaigns. So until you can afford that all-electric Tesla Motors vehicle, here are some things to keep in mind. Taking a bus can mean that you're responsible for only 1/6th the amount of carbon dioxide emissions than if you drove your car. If you have a Prius (or a Nissan Leaf or hybrid Ford, etc.) you release about 1/2 the amount of carbon dioxide into the air.

How do we become more Japanese?
Energy conservation and finding alternative energy sources clearly helps on two fronts: it limits our exposure to countries that don't particularly like us, and it reduces the amount of greenhouse gases that we put in the air.

But perhaps the question for the day is, what are the Japanese doing? If Americans were more like the Japanese, they would use 50% less energy and also live longer. Sounds like a good combination, considering the high quality of life that the Japanese have, as well. On that thought, here's a link to Sakura House, which can help you find a nice apartment in Tokyo.

How hot is it? An answer in 3 charts.

2010-04-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

This Thursday, April 22nd, marks the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day.

So this week, we're taking a look at fascinating and compelling "executive dashboard" reports on the environment - earth intelligence instead of business intelligence. Today, we're kicking it off with charts from the National Climatic Data Center, NASA Earth Observatory, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

First, we try to answer the question. How hot is it?

The answer seems to be: plenty hot.

Here in the United States, the average termperature has risen from 52 Farenheit to 54 Farenheit, a rise of roughly 4% since 1900 (or about 1.4 degrees Centigrade).

It's not just us.
Taking a step back and looking at global temperatures, it appears that global temperatures are on the same trend. The chart below, from NASA, shows that temperature anomalies have also been getting higher (i.e., hotter) since the early 1900s. That's variation upwards of .5 degrees Centigrade from 1900 to 2000.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Is a rise of 0.5 degrees Centigrade a big deal?
Apparently so. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change took a look at average temperatures, starting with tens of thousands of years back. A depression in average temperature of less than 1 degree Centigrade was termed the "Little Ice Age" - this was around the 15th-18th centuries.

A really bad ice age is a downward variation of over 4 degrees Centigrade.

Source: International Panel on Climate Change

But we don't apparently need to worry about skinning mastodons for fur coats - we are going to be experiencing the opposite problem. The IPCC forecasts that in the next 100 years the temperature will rise by 3 degrees Centigrade.

How will that impact us?
It already is impacting us, apparently, in dramatic ways. In the summer of 2002, the Antarctic Peninsula lost 1,250 square miles (3,250 square kilometers) of ice shelf, in less than a month.

Collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002.

Blue rivulets indicate streams of water.

For the full time-sequence images from NASA Earth Observatory, click here.

Closer to home, Glacier National Park just lost two of its named glaciers to melting. In a decade, the remaining 25 named glaciers may also be gone. In order for a glacier to be big enough to qualify for a name, it has to be at least 25 acres large.

Source: Associated Press

Matthew Brown of the Associated Press tracked down Dan Fagre of the US Geological Survey, who has been having a difficult time measuring the glaciers at all, due to their rapid rate of change:"When we're measuring glacier margins, by the time we go home the glacier is already smaller than what we've measured," Fagre said.

The impact of fewer glaciers is reduced water flow for fish and a much greater risk of forest fires.

Stay tuned for more Earth Day postings this week.

Getting out the Crystal Ball - Interesting Predictions for 2010

2010-01-05T06:09:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, one of my favorite things to do is see what predictions people have for 2010. Here are some interesting ones that I've collected so far:

The JD Edwards Advisor blog- mostly focused on JD Edwards/Oracle predictions, but does have one of my favorite predictions:

"Cloud computing hype will rise, but adoption will be limited within our community. BI will be one area where it will start to catch on."

Enterprise Irregulars, predictions on BI from Nenshad Bardoliwalla. My favorite is his prediction #5:

"5. SaaS / Cloud BI Tools will steal significant revenue from on-premise vendors but also fight for limited oxygen amongst themselves. From many accounts, this was the year that SaaS-based offerings hit the mainstream due to their numerous advantages over on-premise offerings, and this certainly was in evidence with the significant uptick in investment and market visibility of SaaS BI vendors."

Your future is in the Cloud

Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010, Gartner Group. The top 2 are:

Cloud computing. Organizations should think about how to approach the cloud in terms of using cloud services, developing cloud-based applications and implementing private cloud computing environments. "Everything will be available as a service," Cearley said. "That doesn't mean you use it all [or] move it all there."
Advanced analytics. Real-time data analysis will enable fraud detection on one hand and prediction and simulation on the other, as organizations use data to look ahead.

And another one from the Gartner Group, predicted in 2009 for 2010:
"By 2010, 20 percent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio. "

Hmm. . . I think I'm noticing a trend!

And I feel compelled to post some interesting predictions from Saxo Bank's annual "Outrageous Predictions for 2010" list:

Gold will fall to $870 in 2010 but will rise to US$1500 in 2014
USDJPY to reach 110
The price of sugar will drop one third

As you can see, they're unusually heartwarming this year.

Some holiday cheer - Birst named a Finalist for Red Herring Global 100

2009-12-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

Pass the eggnog! Birst not only won the Red Herring North America 100 in 2009, but we have also been named a Finalist for the Red Herring Global 100, a competition to win the title of one of the Top 100 Tech Startups in the World.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="354" caption="Bring on the holiday cheer!"][/caption]

We are looking forward to presenting Birst's case - this has been a phenomenal year for us. We have seen:

Rapid customer growth, including major customers like Rackspace Hosting, Children's Choice, and YMCA Metro Atlanta. With even more customers to be announced early next year!

A move to a larger and newer headquarters, to accommodate our growing Birst Team.

Over 20 new systems integrator partners have joined the Birst Partner Network, including some of the largest and most experienced partners for Salesforce.com. This dramatically expands our expertise in core areas such as analytics for sales, marketing, HR, supply chain, and executive decisionmaking.

International customer growth, particularly in the UK.

Major product developments that put Birst at the forefront of business intelligence in the cloud. The Birst team clocked some long hours this year to make sure that customers received the most powerful and easiest to use BI solution available.
- The first comprehensive BI suite in the cloud, from ETL to data warehouses on the fly, to pixel perfect reporting.
- Birst Live Access, which makes Birst the *only* BI provider capable of evaluating both uploaded and on-premise data in the cloud.
- Birst for Salesforce, the premier offering for Salesforce implementations, which has won us tremendous new customers who are interested in better reporting and analytics with Salesforce data combined with othery key business data

A strong start with our OEM partner RightNow, for enterprise level analytics for customer experience management.

Awards! Birst won a number of major awards in 2009, including:
- The Red Herring 100 North America, for leading technology companies
- The TDWI Best Practices Award 2009 for Dashboards and Scorecards, along with our longtime customer RBC Wealth Management
- The Web Award for Software Standard of Excellence
- Recognition by InsideSales for having industry-beating best practices for sales professsionalism and performance. Birst was the only business intelligence company to be recognized.

This honor only confirms Birst's leadership in on-demand business intelligence and demonstrates how SaaS BI is becoming a force for companies large and small.

We are hoping to be able to showcase all of these accomplishments at the Red Herring Global 100 Conference in Laguna Nigel in mid January. For more information on the conference, check out the conference website.

Enjoy the holidays, everyone!

Things to catch at Dreamforce '09 before you go

2009-11-20T02:25:00.000-08:00

The Birst Team has been having a blast showing off Birst 4 and Birst for Salesforce at Dreamforce '09. Thanks to all of the folks who have stopped by our booth, #1210. We've been having some great conversations and signing up lots of free trials!

If you come by this morning, you can meet David Taber, author of Salesforce.com Secrets of Success.

Since today's the last day of the Expo Floor, here are a few of my Dreamforce favorite things and people that you should make sure that you catch:

In the BI/Analytics Category:

Cloud9 Analytics comic book. Kudos to Cloud9 for having a great integrated marketing outreach plan for Dreamforce. I half expected their booth staff to be dressed as superheroes. Special shout out to Don Tyler, their communications person, who put together the "Sales Ops Hero" comic book. You should pick one up. Just be aware that the Birst team doesn't actually wear pocket protectors and look like they stepped out of a 1950's Nasa rocket launch meeting. :-)

Say hi to Jerome Pineau in the GoodData booth and take a chance on winning a solar backpack. Jerome is a blogger/Twitter fanatic that I've been following for a while now. Charming guy, very knowledgeable, and it's nice to know that he actually does exist. He also has good taste in wine and food, so ask him for a good restaurant for lunch. You can also enter to win a GoodData solar backpack, which is one of the most nifty giveaway gifts I've seen at the show, and learn more about the benefits of SaaS BI. Jerome is on Twitter @JeromePineau

Say hi to Darren Cunningham in the Informatica booth and learn more about Informatica Cloud Services. Darren is knowledgeable about Salesforces, SaaS BI, and the new Informatica 9 data integration in the cloud. Yet another person who's got some good perspective. Like Jerome, you can also follow him on Twitter: @dcunni Informatica is also giving away a snazzy Tag Heuer watch.

Vendors with fun stuff:

Stop by the Astadia booth and pick up your pair of free Crocs. After cruising Dreamforce for the past few days, your feet may thank you for it.

Which reminds me - the Deloitte booth has the most Purell I've ever seen in one place. So if you've been shaking hands all day, stop by to sanitize them, talk to Deloitte, and get some candy. They also have some nice couches for sitting on while you talk to them.

What can I say? I want a Smart car. Xactly has one on raffle. Go sign up. (Yes, they're small. Great for people who live in SF, though. Easy parking!)

Plush toys for the kids: Birst has flying pigs. Another vendor down our row has flying monkeys. Collect the set!

Photo opportunity: you probably got your picture with the Salesforce characters (which allows you to participate in the conversation - Is Chatty scary or fun?). Dun & Bradstreet also has a talking robot in their booth that's good for a fun photo. Catch it before it goes!

Have a great time in these last hours of Dreamforce!

Birst at Dreamforce - come by for a demo and free gift!

2009-11-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Dreamforce is finally upon us! We are looking forward to showing off how easy it is to get started doing the sales reporting that you need in Birst. And we're looking forward to meeting you and giving you one of the fun, free gifts we have available. We have heard that registrations are now at 14,000, and we don't have *that* many gifts, so stop by booth #1210 as soon as you can to make sure that you get one.

Here's what's going on with Birst at Dreamforce:

Tuesday, November 17th - Grab a cocktail and come by booth #1210, 6-8pm
- Kick off Dreamforce in style by coming to the Welcome Reception and cruising the Expo floor. Tonight's your best odds of getting a gift.

Wednesday, November 18th - Demos all day long until 8pm. And pick up a gift.
- The Birst Team will be delighted to show you a demo of our Birst solutions.
- Birst for Salesforce
  - Learn how you can get up and running quickly with dashboards and reports, including pipeline, forecasting, and snapshots of your Salesforce CRM data.
  - See why we're 5 Star Rated on AppExchange!
- Birst for Force.com
  - Learn how Birst can easily connect to the data kept in any Force.com-based solution, as well, and how you can analyze data across Salesforce CRM and Force.com Apps
- Live Access - new in Birst 4!
  - Come learn about the hottest new feature from Birst - the ability to analyze data in the cloud, while leaving it safe and secure in your on-premise data warehouse. This was the killer feature at the latest TDWI World Conference in early November. Now it's at Dreamforce!

Thursday, November 19th - Come to the Cloud Crawl Party at the Temple Nightclub with Birst.
- Stop by the Birst booth to get your stamp to attend the Cloud Crawl Party on Thursday night! Join the fun at the Temple Nightclub with Birst.
- Missed the demos on Wednesday? We'll be showing off Birst all day Thursday, as well. Come learn why companies like Rackspace Hosting chose Birst over all other on-demand BI solutions for their Salesforce CRM analysis.

Friday, November 20th - Meet "Salesforce Secrets of Success" author David Taber at the Birst booth, #1210
- David Taber will be signing copies of his book and discussing how analytics can help you become more successful with Salesforce.
- Also, find out how you can sign up for David's webinar on Dec.3rd and how you can download a free chapter of his book.

We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Announcing Birst 4: The first and only Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite

2009-11-03T01:48:00.000-08:00

Birst is pleased to announce Birst 4, The Comprehensive Cloud BI Suite. Birst 4 is the first and only full-featured, fully integrated business intelligence solution, including advanced ETL services, data warehouses created on the fly, and integrated reporting services, such as Smart Dashboards, pixel perfect reporting, and alerts. Birst 4 is the only cloud BI solution that is comprehensive, enterprise class, and yet affordable and easy to use, so that even small businesses and departments of enterprises can get up and running quickly.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="354" caption="An operational analytics dashboard in Birst 4"][/caption]

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. Learn more about Live Access.

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. Learn more about Birst Advanced ETL Services.

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. Learn more about Birst Reporting 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. Learn more about Smart Dashboards.

Customers are already excited about Birst 4.

Existing Birst customers have already thoroughly evaluated the new Birst 4 solution and are giving it strong reviews. “Children’s Choice is dedicated to providing high quality childcare, and our existing Birst deployment has already given us tremendous insight into performance improvement opportunities that uphold our tradition of excellence,” said Dan Lawler, CFO of Children’s Choice, a provider of early care and education programs to children and families. “After getting a sneak preview of Birst 4, we’re excited about the advanced functionality and improvements for business user self-service reporting. We’re looking forward to deploying it broadly throughout our organization.”

For the Birst 4 press release, click here.

For an overview of Birst 4, click here.

Where to find Birst at TDWI Orlando

2009-11-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

TDWI Orlando is already upon us! I hope that everyone is enjoying the warm Florida weather.

Here's where you can find Birst at TDWI Orlando this year.

Find Birst on the Exhibit Floor in Booth #207. Catch a demo and a flying gift!

Find out how Birst enables Pervasive BI at your organization with fast, easy, affordable, and complete BI solutions.

Get a free gift - it flys and it makes noise! It's a proven winner with kids.

Enter to win a Wii to take home to show off to family and friends.

Exhibit hours are Tuesday, 11:15 AM- 2:15 PM, as well as 5 to 7 PM

Exhibit hours on Wednesday are 11:15 AM to 2 PM

See Brad Peters, Birst CEO, and see a sneak peek of our latest release at Cindi Howson's "Cool BI" Session on Tuesday, Nov. 3rd.

Cindi Howson, the keynote speaker at TDWI Orlando and a leading analyst, is teaching a session on the latest innovations in business intelligence. The session starts at 2:15 PM. Learn more about the Cool BI Session.

Brad Peters joins a panel discussionon at Steve Dine's "BI In the Cloud" session on Thursday, Nov. 5th.

Stephen Dine, the President of Datasource Consulting, is leading a new session called "BI In the Cloud" on Thursday. This is a full day session, starting at 9 am. Brad Peters will be participating in a vendor panel during the afternoon portion. Learn more about the BI In the Cloud session.

And be sure to check online for our big announcement on Tuesday, November 3rd!

Where to find Birst - TDWI Orlando, Dreamforce and more

2009-10-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

The Birst Team is having a busy Q4. A crack team of ours just got back from rave reviews at the Cloudforce Toronto event, where we showed off our ability to create Salesforce CRM pipeline reporting dashboards in just a few minutes.

Here's where you can find us next:

RightNow Summit Americas, October 26 -28, 2009

Come find out how RightNow Enterprise Analytics, powered by Birst, is bringing fast, comprehensive analysis to RightNow customers.

The RightNow Summit was a big hit last year, and we're looking forward to another fun few days at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We'll try to beat our mechanical bull riding score from last year.

Midsize Enterprise Canada, October 28, 2009

Birst is a Gold Sponsor of this premier IT leadership event, held in Toronto at the Westin Harbor Castle. We're looking forward to some great conversations with IT execs from leading companies across Canada.

RightNow Summit EMEA, November 2-4, 2009

The Birst Team travels to Brighton to meet with the European customer base of RightNow and show how RightNow Enterprise Analytics is bringing improved insight to its European customers.

We're assuming that there will be no mechanical bull at this event, so we're looking forward to what the RightNow event team has in store for the Gala Dinner on Nov. 3rd.

TDWI World Conference, Orlando November 2-4, 2009

While some of the team is enjoying bangers and mash in Brighton, another part of the Birst Team will be enjoying the autumn in Orlando at the TDWI World Conference.

Brad Peters, Birst CEO, will be participating in two panels in the event, Cindi Howson's "Cool BI: The Latest Innovations" panel on Tuesday, as well as Steve Dine's "BI In the Cloud" session on Thursday.

Birst is also planning a big announcement on Tuesday, November 3rd (more on this later), and you should be sure to get your Birst giveaway quickly at the Birst booth, since we had overwhelming demand at our last event. We're sending more this time, but they go quick!

Dreamforce, November 17-20, 2009

Birst is a Bronze Sponsor of Dreamforce, and based on the enthusiastic response at the Cloudforce Toronto event, we're looking forward to a great time showing off our ability to quickly create Salesforce CRM dashboards and reports in Birst.

We'll also be showcasing some of our customer success stories, hosting a "Salesforce Secrets of Success" book giveaway, and showing how pigs can fly (stop by the booth!).

Can't make it to any of these events? We'll be happy to give you a personalized demo of Birst over the web, just contact us.

The anxiety of the times: startups and the question of survivability

2009-09-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

Having experienced the unbelievable turmoil in the markets in the past 12-18 months, there's no surprise that people are questioning the viability not only of major companies, but of younger, less established ones, too.

Birst was founded in 2004. If you had asked us then if there would ever be a time that Birst would be thriving in an environment in which Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were not, we would have laughed. Those enormous, brand name companies going under or getting sold at a deep discount while our young company prospered? That was about as likely as a titan like General Motors going into bankruptcy, surely.

And yet all of those things happened.

So it's understandable that companies would be concerned about the viability of vendors from whom they want to buy mission-critical products and services. Boris Evelson of Forrester recently raised this concern on Twitter, reflecting the anxiety that has arisen about on-demand business intelligence vendors in the wake of LucidEra's closure.

Established, traditional business intelligence companies have been particularly eager to use the LucidEra story to discredit the entire on-demand business intelligence category because on-demand BI can offer a better deal to customers - powerful BI that's rapidly deployed, at an affordable price.

So if you're one of the growing number of companies interested in this better BI value proposition, how can you overcome concerns about viability?

Here are a few things that we would consider if we were looking at BI vendors, in terms of viability alone:

1. What’s your financial strength? Birst, for example, raised over $10mm in financing last fall and has no need to raise additional financing for the next few years, if ever. Birst raised funds during a particularly tumultuous time in the market, yet still raised it in just 10 days. That's record time.

There are multiple ways to consider financial strength:

Amount of financing raised, and how long this funding should last

Current revenue base

Growth in bookings in revenue over the past 12 months

Cash flow position

2. How solid is your customer base? Birst has a diverse, solid customer base, including enterprise customers with large deployments, which ensures that the company has a strong revenue base and can continue to serve your needs in the future.

There are various ways to evaluate a customer base:

Size of current customer base

Growth rate of customer base

Composition of customer base (lots of small companies providing small cashflows, large companies providing large cashflows, or a mix?)

3. What is your renewal rate? SaaS BI companies are paid on subscription, which renew monthly or annually. So SaaS BI companies are generally invested in the long-term satisfaction of their customers. The higher the renewal rate, the more satisfied their customers are.

4. Do you have customer references? Who is the longest-subscribing customer that you have? You should be provided with case studies on existing customers or provided the contact information of a current customer who can candidly discuss their experience. Preferably, it would be a customer who has subscribed for a lengthy period of time.

One strong indication is if customers win awards for their solution. Birst's customer RBC Wealth Management, one of the largest wealth management companies in the US, recently won the prestigious TDWI Best Practices Award for Dashboards and Scorecards. RBC Wealth Management has been a customer of Birst's for multiple years.

Doing due diligence on vendor viability is important, for any solution that you're purchasing - be it CRM, ERP, or BI. The above are the types of questions that companies have to ask of all of their vendors.

Even when you're dealing with a very large company, recall that divisions of large companies are often shuttered or simply cease ongoing product support. Many large technology companies have been on an acquisition spree in the past few years, and subsequently stop supporting whole product lines on which customers have depended for years. So even if the company looks really strong as a whole, make sure that you're asking tough questions of the division within that company from which you're actually purchasing a solution.

Purchase anxiety will be unavoidable over the next few years. Just make sure that you're asking the right questions and getting good answers before you buy, if the solution you're considering is Oracle, SAP/BusinessObjects, or Birst.

(As an aside, I particularly liked the interactive chart that the New York TImes published last weekend of the contraction and expansion of the financial industry in the past 12 months. Click here to see it.)

Another myth falls by the wayside- IT execs do like SaaS

2009-09-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Birst Team recently returned from the Midsize Enterprise Summit in LA, which focuses on IT managers and decision-makers for midmarket companies. We expected to hear many tales of woe - midsize organizations are often large enough to have decently sized IT teams and a deep understanding of technological complexity and capability, but really not enough resources to go around. It can sometimes feel like the curse of knowledge - you know enough to realize that you're in a tough situation, but you don't have the resources to get out of it.

And the squeeze has only gotten more intense over the last 12 months, as IT teams have had to grapple with economic realities, streamlining teams and budgets. Of course, the list of demands on IT rarely goes down, leaving the team feeling beleaguered.

So we were expecting to see some signs of wariness in the attendees at the event. What we found, however, was a souped-up crowd of IT executives ready and eager to tackle their 2010 projects, and open to new ideas about the best way to do so. The on-demand business intelligence story, with its message of powerful analytics, fast deployment, and affordability, really found a receptive audience at the event. (It also didn't hurt that we had a fun giveaway that even our competitors were asking for.)

So it was nice to see this conference demolish another myth about SaaS - that IT departments don't like SaaS and won't approve it. On the contrary, these IT execs were excited about the possibilities of SaaS and how it can help their under-resourced IT teams accomplish more without heavy capital investment and implementation time. It's nice to see these forward-thinking execs yet again proving the conventional wisdom wrong.

(Birst has already demolished one of the most pervasive myths - that enterprises don't buy it. That's news to our customers Securian and RBC Wealth Management.)

Birst is back from TDWI - big fancy plaques and a story of sabotage (?!)

2009-08-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the Birst booth at TDWI. The Birst team had a blast meeting so many people excited about the possibilities of BI and enjoyed all of the demos that we gave.

Big thanks to Shawn Spott, the RBC Wealth Management winner of the Best Practices 2009 Award for Dashboards and Scorecards. We didn't realize until we got to the event how many people applied this year, and we were surprised and humbled to see that we had won against some big deployments of traditional enterprise BI. It's really a credit to the vision of the RBC Wealth Management team that they had such a bold view of what BI could accomplish, and were willing to work with a relatively newer company to make that vision a reality.

Shawn and Birst each got their own big, heavy plaque to take home to the office. For a picture of the win, click here.

And thanks to the analysts and journalists who took the time to meet with us at the event. Next time I go to TDWI, I want to go as an analyst. In addition to their long hours meeting companies, seeing demos, and sitting in on sessions, they knew how to get the most out of a conference -- Shawn Rogers has some great pictures of his time sailing on a boat, enjoying the libations at Whiskey Girl, and noshing at Croce's in the Gaslamp District. You can see it all on his Twitter profile: http://twitter.com/shawnrog

And one funny story from the BI Executive Summit. TDWI does a great job of setting up so that it's easy for companies to demo their solutions to attendees. So it was a bit of a surprise to find our power suddenly go off during the BI Executive Summit reception on Monday night, which was prime demo time. Our intrepid Sales Engineer followed the various cords until they terminated at a power strip that had mysteriously been switched off. The power strip was located in IBM's area, where the employees seemed strangely unsurprised and, in fact, downright bemused at our discovery. Hmmm. . .

Birst at TDWI World Conference San Diego, 2009 - where to find us

2009-08-03T02:48:00.000-07:00

Birst is out in force at the TDWI World Conference in San Diego over the next three days. Here's where to find us:

Monday, August 3rd: World Conference and BI Executive Summit

8 A.M. Keynote: RBC Wealth Management and Birst receive their TDWI Best Practices Award 2009 for Dashboards and Scorecards

Noon: Brad Peters, CEO, and John Pierson, VP of Sales and Marketing, are at the Executive Summit Networking Lunch

5pm - 7pm: Brad Peters, John Pierson, and RBC Award Winner, Shawn Spott, are at the Exec Summit Reception and Exhibition

Tuesday, August 4th: World Conference

The show floor is open! Come visit Birst in Booth #109. Be sure to get your stamp to win a Wii and the Wii Sports Resort package.
- 11:30 AM, Shawn Spott, TDWI Best Practices Award Winner, will be discussing the high ROI dashboard implementation at RBC Wealth Management. Presentation is in the "Birst Theater" in the Birst booth area.
- 1:30 PM, Shawn Spott does an encore presentation of his award-winning Birst deployment

3:35 PM Executive Summit, Shawn Spott and Brad Peters give a detailed overview of the RBC Wealth Management case study

5 PM Come meet the Birst crew during the reception. Julie Mayhew will be happy to give you a detailed walkthrough of Birst.

Wednesday, August 5th: World Conference

9:15 am, Executive Summit: Brad Peters participates on a panel discussion "The Future of BI"

The show floor is still open! Come visit Birst in Booth #109. Last day to get your stamp to win a Wii.
- Noon: Brad Peters presents "Closing the Decision Gap" Presentation is in the "Birst Theater" in the Birst booth area.
- 1:30 pm: Brad Peters encore presentation of "Closing the Decision Gap"

We hope to see you there!

Where to find Birst - TDWI World Conference, MidSize Enterprise, Dreamforce

2009-07-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

Want to meet up with Birst in person? See a demo of our solutions and hear about our award-winning customer implementations? Or just want to take home some lovely Birst logo ware?

Here are the events that Birst will be attending in the next few months:

August 3rd-5th, 2009. TDWI World Conference, San Diego. Birst is a Platinum Sponsor of the BI Executive Summit and is also sponsoring the main event. Come visit our extra large booth and hear Shawn Spott of RBC Wealth Management talk about his award-winning implementation of Birst. Click here for details on the TDWI World Conference and BI Executive Summit.

September 13-16th, 2009. MidSize Enterprise Summit West, Los Angeles. Birst is an Event Sponsor of this invitation-only summit for the IT execs of larger midsize businesses. To find out more about MidSize Enterprise Summit West and to get yourself invited, click here.

November 17th-20th, 2009. Dreamforce Global Gathering, San Francisco. It's the Cloud Computing Event of the Year, brought to you by salesforce.com. Birst is a Bronze Sponsor of Dreamforce. Come by and hear about how salesforce.com customers like Rackspace Hosting are using Birst analytics to better drive sales and improve their business. To learn more about Dreamforce, click here. To see Birst's AppExchange posting, click here.

If you can't make it to lovely San Diego, Los Angeles, or San Francisco (really, it's sunnier in November than in foggy July, it's a much better time to be here), you can always just set up a demo of Birst by contacting the Birst team, and we will be happy to send you a lovely digital memento photo of the view from Birst world headquarters in downtown San Francisco at the time of your demo. It will almost be like being here in person.

Considering alternatives to LucidEra - some thoughts

2009-07-20T01:25:00.000-07:00

Lately, we've frequently been asked our opinion on the solution options that former LucidEra customers have, since we're one of the vendors who offer an alternative.

As believers in the value of SaaS BI, and also believers in the value that LucidEra was providing its customers, we'd like to offer some of our thoughts about how to approach finding a new solution that fits your unique needs. The vendors are fairly diverse and have different strengths and weaknesses. Here are the things that we would think about if we were considering our options:

1. Salesforce.com AppExchange certified partners vs. non-certified? LucidEra was an AppExchange certified solution with very positive rankings (a strong testament to their product, marketing, sales, and support teams). What this means is that Salesforce.com had reviewed their solution, checked that it indeed provided the general services that it claimed, and gave it a throrough security review.

You can check very quickly if a solution is AppExchange certified. Just click here and type the vendor name into the "Find Apps" search box. If the vendor has a posting, they're certified.

2. Ability to handle multiple data sources vs. Salesforce.com data only. Some vendors can connect your Salesforce data with information from other systems, like finance, operations, or marketing. This can be helpful, since it can provide you with a broader range of analysis that looks across your business. Other vendors have very specific applications that are geared only towards Salesforce.com data. The latter might be appropriate if you're confident that you only want Salesforce.com-specific analysis today and in the foreseeable future.

One note of caution - you might need multiple data sources and not quite realize it. For example, did you want to see pipeline lead to close with actual revenue generated? Then you're connecting sales automation data with finance data. So give this point careful consideration as you consider what reporting you really want to see.

3. Ability to handle custom objects in Salesforce - need it or not? Many companies have gone beyond standard Salesforce CRM functionality and have built custom areas within Salesforce to better serve their particular business. These are known as "custom objects." If you have custom objects, it is very likely that you want some analysis and reporting on them. If so, be sure that the vendors that you are considering can do this.

4. How much power and flexibility do you need? Some vendors are providing reporting applications - targeted solutions that can quickly provide a range of standard reports, mostly on standard information, like pipeline analysis. Others, like Birst, are providing that reporting plus the ability to create automatically updated dashboards, create custom reports on the fly (known as ad hoc reporting), and the ability to "drill into" reports and see greater underlying detail (known as data exploration). A vendor with this kind of capability is regarded as a general BI solution, not just an application.

Given the current economic climate, you probably have some concerns regarding vendor viability, as well. There are a few things you can ask about here, as well, such as:

1. What's your financial strength? Birst, for example, raised over $10mm in financing last fall and has no need to raise additional financing for the next few years, if ever.

2. How solid is your customer base? Birst has a diverse, solid customer base, including enterprise customers with large deployments, which ensures that the company has a strong revenue base and can continue to serve your needs in the future.

3. What is your renewal rate? SaaS BI companies are paid on subscription, which renew monthly or annually. So SaaS BI companies are generally invested in the long-term satisfaction of their customers. The higher the renewal rate, the more satisfied their customers are.

One thing that might surprise you about our criteria is that we don't consider cost of the solution to be a big differentiating factor. Total Cost of Ownership is certainly something to keep in mind and should be on the general consideration list. But one of the best things about SaaS BI is that it is generally significantly more affordable than traditional on-premise BI solutions. Going with *any* SaaS BI vendor is likely going to be a big TCO win on this front, so it doesn't make sense to simply evaluate on price. Finding a solution that meets your needs is most important.

If you're looking for more opinions on this topic, Aberdeen recently came out with a Market Alert discussing LucidEra and future options.

"On-Demand BI Takes Off" - Brad Peters in Information Management

2009-07-16T05:13:00.000-07:00

Brad Peters, Birst CEO, recently had an article published in Information Management about the upswing in demand for on-demand business intelligence by companies of all sizes. Here are a few key points from the article:

Why On-Demand BI Makes Sense

Rapid time-to-value. Results are delivered in weeks rather than months or years, putting valuable analytics in the hands of business users who can have the greatest impact on revenue and profits.

More affordable implementations. Results are delivered at less cost, because both the software and services components are dramatically reduced.

Greater flexibility. Dashboards and reports can be made accessible to business users who initiate and complete their own analysis and report creation, so the system can keep pace with ever‐evolving business needs.

"On-Demand Business Intelligence" covers a surprisingly broad range of solutions when you take a close look at it, and so interested companies need to think carefully about what their needs are and which benefits make the most sense for them. Here's a summary of how Brad breaks down the three general options:

The ASP Approach. These vendors take existing BI software, develop custom solutions for their customers, and deliver it online as a service, often employing standard data models to accelerate the deployment process. This approach reduces the cost and deployment time of the solution by providing BI expertise using standard data models and absorbing hardware costs for their customers.

For customers, the ASP approach is appropriate in situations where standard functionality is desired from what is essentially a hosted version of an on-premise software solution. Customization may be limited, however, and require deployment times comparable to on-premise installations, limiting the value proposition.

Pre-built application approach. The second group of on-demand BI vendors has approached the problem differently. Instead of applying traditional tools and labor to address customer needs, they have built targeted applications for known data sources such as Salesforce.com or Oracle Financials.

These vendors aim to lower deployment time and cost by prebuilding integrated applications or sets of reports, thereby enabling multiple customers to benefit from a single application or report set. . . The prebuilt application approach can be deployed quickly, targets a key area (such as sales analytics) and meets basic needs. There are limitations regarding the amount of customization, breadth of data sources to analyze and analytical depth.

The integrated Saas BI approach. Another category of vendors has developed broadly deployable SaaS platforms that can quickly be configured to analyze any data across the organization. These vendors have created new software platforms fundamentally designed for on-demand delivery that offer speed, flexibility and cost advantages. These solutions typically have the following characteristics:

- Built specifically for on-demand delivery (not a hosted version of an on-premise solution): one, single version that gets upgraded automatically, a single, consolidated platform (the entire software stack) and deployment methodology;
- Leverages automation for deployment and user provisioning, so deployment time is dramatically reduced;
- Handles multiple data sources and databases; and
- Easily allows customization and full analytical capability.

Integrated SaaS BI offers high value with deep customization and flexibility, and can more easily evolve and scale as business needs change and grow. If a customer’s needs are basic and strictly limited, however, this level of solution might not be necessary.

On-demand BI is gaining increasing ground as customers realize that it is a fast, affordable, and powerful way to address critical BI projects. Not just for small and midsize companies, recent events, such as RBC Wealth Management's win of the TDWI Best Practices award for its Birst implementation, show that enterprises are successfully adopting on-demand BI as well.

For the full article, click here.

RBC Wealth Management wins the TDWI Best Practices Award 2009 for Dashboards and Scorecards

2009-07-14T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing, has awarded Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management its Best Practices Award 2009 for Dashboards and Scorecards.

Royal Bank of Canada is using Birst to power its "RBC Dashboard." RBC Dashboard is a business intelligence dashboard that distributes key metrics and reports to its financial advisors, the people who are the front line organization of RBC Wealth Management and have some of the most frequent and involved interaction with clients. The dashboards have improved benchmarking of financial advisor performance, helped advisors to identify attractive client segments, and provided better tactical information to front-line on how to approach their business.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="135" caption="Congratulations to the RBC Wealth Management team!"][/caption]

The RBC Dashboard has demonstrated a rapid and strong ROI for Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management. Advisors using RBC Dashboard increased deposits with targeted households and improved asset gathering over their entire business.

Shawn Spott, Vice President, Manager of Marketing Research at RBC Wealth Management, will be accepting the TDWI Award on behalf of RBC at the TDWI World Conference 2009 in San Diego on August 3rd. He will also be discussing the details of RBC's award-winning solution with TDWI attendees on Tuesday, August 4th, in the Exhibit Hall.

Birst, a Platinum Sponsor of the BI Executive Summit at the conference, will also be on hand to answer questions and demonstrate its BI solutions.

For more information on RBC's win, check out the press release.

Birst goes to Boulder for the BI Brain Trust

2009-07-10T06:05:00.000-07:00

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.)

Watching the lights go down at LucidEra - lessons learned

2009-06-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

It’s always unfortunate to see a fellow startup shut its doors, even when you compete with it, since strong competitors validate the overall concept for which we’re all fighting – the benefits of on-demand business intelligence. The benefits are real. The value to customers is real. Unfortunately for LucidEra, their particular approach – specific applications, instead of general BI solutions -- proved itself weak in the marketplace.

Here’s one fellow competitor’s opinion on what they got right and what they missed.

What LucidEra got right:

LucidEra was a strong evangelist for why on-demand can be a faster, lower cost, and more effective option, and the industry is better off for it.

LucidEra understood that, for many companies (and especially small and mid-size ones), having a solution that can be up and running quickly is very important. Companies want answers as quickly as they can, and if given the choice between an expensive, time-consuming deployment and a quick one, they’ll pick the quick one.

LucidEra also understood that where BI can be most powerful is at the point where it really impacts the business – at the front lines, like the sales team.

What LucidEra missed:

Customers want full-fledged BI made easier, not simplified applications. LucidEra’s solution to the customer need for quicker and easier BI was to offer applications instead of a true BI solution. This meant a standardized data model approach and standardized reports. This approach requires customers to adapt their business problem to the LucidEra solution, when what customers really wanted was a quicker, easier solution that fit their particular business needs.

The ability to handle multiple data sources matters. To simplify deployments and deliver quickly, LucidEra started off focusing on Salesforce.com data only. However, customers often wanted to combine that data with information from other systems, like their marketing, finance, and operational systems. While LucidEra started moving in this direction later, it prevented them from getting crucial customer momentum when they needed it.

Customers want the flexibility and power of true BI. While customers like rapid deployments, they also want to know that the system is powerful enough to answer spontaneous business questions or identify and address unusual trends as they arise – all things which you can get from a traditional BI solution. And they want a system that will grow with them as their needs grow. If you wanted something other than that standard report, how easy was it to get there? It appears that they didn’t have a strong answer for that. There are a lot of components that go in a true Business Intelligence solution – LucidEra was hoping that customers would be willing to sacrifice power and flexibility for speed and low cost. It seems that customers want the power along with the speed and low cost.

There may be some industry naysayers out there who will wave LucidEra’s demise around as a flag of surrender for the overall on-demand business intelligence space. I think that this is shortsighted. While LucidEra may be an example of why overly targeted BI applications don’t have a large enough market to survive, it is not a harbinger of doom for the overall on-demand BI industry.

There are other vendors out there, Birst being one, who offer the speed, low cost, flexibility, and scalability that customers demand. They are thriving because they are doing right what LucidEra got right, and they are also providing the pieces that were missing.

For companies interested in learning more about Birst as they consider their options after LucidEra, you can read more about our solution at birst.com/salesforce or you can find us on the Salesforce.com App Exchange.

Birst is also offering a “Quick Switch” program whereby LucidEra customers who switch to Birst by August 1, 2009, will receive 25% off of subscription services. For more information, contact the Birst Team.

Birst now available on the Salesforce AppExchange

2009-06-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce that Birst is now available on Salesforce.com's Force.com AppExchange.

In our recent Early Summer Release, Birst introduced Salesforce Connect, a data connector that allows salesforce.com customers to easily analyze their Salesforce CRM data, including custom objects, within Birst.

So, you're probably thinking as you yawn, don't a lot of other companies do this already? What's the big deal?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="160" caption="It's more exciting than you think."][/caption]

There are a few big reasons that this is an exciting development. Yes, other companies connect to Salesforce information and analyze it. What Birst does differently is:

Analysis and reporting on custom objects, in addition to standard Salesforce data. Many companies have customized their Salesforce solution to fit the unique information and processes required by their business. So they have built what are known as "custom objects." Other solutions can easily handle standard data, but they can't analyze nor report on custom objects. If it were important enough for a company to build the custom objects in the first place, they probably want some reporting on them. That's where Birst comes in.

Analyze your Salesforce information with information from other systems and databases that are important to you. Birst also allows business users to analyze data from other systems, such as marketing, finance, and operations, along with their Salesforce CRM data. This means that you can run reports that you simply can't do with other solutions -- you can see, for example, which marketing campaigns (marketing system) are driving opportunities in Salesforce CRM and real revenues (financial system).

Enterprise class business intelligence that's easy to use and scale. If you are a larger company, you're probably looking beyond standardized charts and reports - you want in-depth analytics that's easy to use and easy to scale over time. Before, your only choice was going with Salesforce in combination with a complicated, traditional BI provider. Now, you have an easier to deploy, easier to use, on-demand option.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="207" caption="Did you say custom objects and multiple data sources? Now we're paying attention."][/caption]

It's for reasons like these that Birst has already been chosen by customers like Rackspace Hosting. As Sean Wedige, the Vice President of Sales Technical Operations at Rackspace Hosting said, “Birst was the only vendor that we believed could quickly get us a powerful business intelligence solution that not only handles custom objects, but also combines information from other systems".

Salesforce Connect is available to all levels of Birst customers, including users of the introductory free version, Birst Free. Birst also offers rapid implementation services for custom deployments, and has a network of systems integrator partners to assist with implementations.

You can see Birst on the Force.com App Exchange by clicking here.

To check out the full press release and see what else Sean had to say, click here.

To go to the Birst for Salesforce microsite, go to www.birst.com/salesforce

Birst's Early Summer Release 2009 now available!

2009-06-08T01:09:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Birst's Early Summer Release 2009. This release features major improvements to the Birst user experience. Now it’s even easier to create the reports and dashboards that you need to run your business effectively.

Feature improvements include:

New Flex interface for ad hoc reporting that’s more intuitive and easy to use

Expanded array of advanced chart types, including gauges

Easy “click” menu of options helps you quickly to do what you want to do in the ad hoc reporting area

Easy “color picker” speeds the time to create custom formatted charts

New “set-based” filter type

Dynamic data-driven assignment of users to groups, for easier user management

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="306" caption="Early Summer Release 2009!"][/caption]

All Birst customers will be automatically upgraded to the benefits of the Early Summer Release 2009. All of your existing data, reports, and dashboards should transition smoothly to the new version.

To learn more about the Early Summer Release 2009, including feature descriptions and an FAQ, go to birst.com/earlysummerrelease2009

Not a Birst customer yet? Even people who sign up for free today will automatically get the Early Summer Release 2009. Click here to request a free account for the leading on-demand business intelligence solution available today.

Thanks for your continued support, we hope that you enjoy the Early Summer Release.

From ad gurus to data geeks - Andrew McAfee on the diminishment of Don Draper

2009-06-05T07:20:00.000-07:00

Andrew McAfee, the MIT professor who has a blog on the business impact of information technology, recently posted a compelling article titled "The Diminishment of Don Draper."

Don Draper is the lead character from AMC's mid-century advertising drama, "Mad Men." For those not familiar with the series, Don pulls in big advertising consulting fees for delivering suave, charismatic pitches for consumer products. While hailed as a genius or a guru, it's not really clear, as McAfee points out, that Don actually generates a positive ROI for his clients.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="Got an ROI for that, Don?"][/caption]

McAfee proposes that companies are moving towards a more data driven decisionmaking model, even when it comes to more historically fuzzy areas like advertising and marketing. He cites the major hurdle to this more data-sensitive model as mostly culture oriented - that is, companies often don't have the true organizational and political will to run experiments and find out the truth. They often decide what to do, then marshal "facts" and arguments to support the pre-made decision.

While I don't disagree with this, I think there is another issue at play here, and it's demonstrated by the positive example he cites of Staples office supply using the market research company Affinnova to help determine which packaging design options are most appropriate for their recycled office paper line. Affinnova broke down the different elements of package design and, in a very cool experiment, tested those 22,000 potential combinations before 750 panelists over the course of a week. The resulting patterns in preference for design, font, color, etc. led Staples to redesign their packaging. While no results are given, it's presumably a success.

The only catch? Staples presumably has a huge market research budget and the luxury of taking the time to hire the consulting firm, set up the study, run it for a week, and analyze the results. So even if your organization wants to be data driven, unless you have the dollars and the time to do this, companies may be wondering if their only choice is to turn to your internal Don Draper to make a best guess at what the customer wants.

Rather than resort to Don, I would suggest that you can turn to your internal business intelligence solution to analyze the data that you already have to get an answer more affordably, and faster. It might not be as cool an answer as Affinnova can provide, but you can examine how historical package changes have impacted sales, analyze current buying trends, and come up with a more rational triangulation. Ifyou're using an on-demand business intelligence solution, achieving this should take limited amounts of time and funds, and leaves you with an ongoing analysis that gives you more insight over time, rather than a consulting report that reflects just a moment in time.

If you're curious about McAfee, check out his blog. He provides refreshingly rigorous, thoughtful, and lengthy blog postings about technology and business. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School, and a visiting Associate Professor at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management.

"Year of Selling Dangerously" now on Slideshare

2009-06-01T04:05:00.000-07:00

One of our most popular webinars has been our "Year of Selling Dangerously" webinar about sales tactics and the sales analysis that you need to know in tough times.

We've now made the slides available on Slideshare, so that anyone can benefit from these sales reporting and analysis tips.

The Year Of Selling Dangerously - Sales and Analytics Tips for Dangerous Times

View more OpenOffice presentations from birster.

If you'd like to see the full webinar, click here. To learn more about Birst and sales analytics, click here.

Birst Wins "Red Herring 100 North America"

2009-05-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

Last week, Birst dueled with the other Red Herring finalists in San Diego. We are honored to announce that we emerged as one of the Red Herring 100 North America Winners!

This is a privilege that we dedicate to our growing partner and customer base. Without the vision, enthusiasm, and support of customers and partners, achieving this recognition would be impossible. We are very proud to have helped them achieve their business intelligence and reporting goals in a way that was quick, easy, and affordable for them.

We enjoy spreading the word about the value of business intelligence in general and on-demand business intelligence in particular. The Red Herring has caught on to the value of business intelligence - data warehouse provider (and friends of Birst) Aster Data and open-source provider Jaspersoft were also among the winners. Go BI!

It was also great to see a cloud computing and on-demand theme, with the win of subscription billing company Zuora. Go On-Demand!

We are delighted to be in such esteemed company. To see the full list, click here.

Birst sales analytics dashboard featured on Dashboard Insight

2009-05-18T04:00:00.000-07:00

Sales analytics and reporting has been one of the most popular areas for Birst business intelligence implementations. Sales executives can get greater insight into the drivers of sales when they use Birst to combine that information with marketing and real revenue results, so that they can finally see things like quota to forecast to sales.

Dashboard Insight, a site dedicated to business intelligence, executive dashboards, and empowering companies with more and better information, is featuring Birst's sales analytics dashboard this week.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="340" caption="Dashboard of the Week!"][/caption]

You can also chek out an interactive version of this sales analytics dashboard in our demos section. Click here.

Swine flu's impact on the FTSE 100

2009-05-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

Spectrum, a social media analysis company based in the UK, recently showed the impact of swine flu on British travel and leisure companies. The cost to these companies in market value? A whopping 413 million British pounds.

The chart that they've produced documenting this, below, impressively reinforces the value of business intelligence - delivering rapid insight into changing market conditions.

From Spectrum's blog:

Swine flu fever has gripped the country in more ways than one. Our analysis reveals that the virus wiped a combined total of £413 million from the value of FTSE 100 travel and leisure companies British Airways, TUI Travel, Carnival and Thomas Cook in just three days. Carnival has been the worst hit in financial terms, losing £187 million from its value followed by British Airways, TUI Travel and Thomas Cook which lost £156 million, £41 million and £29 million respectively. However, the biggest loser in percentage terms is British Airways, which has lost 8.3% of its value. Carnival, TUI Travel and Thomas Cook have lost 4.7%, 1.4% and 1.3%, respectively.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="638" caption="There goes 413 million British pounds."][/caption]

The report is also a great example of the power of Fin-buzz, a market sentiment analysis service recently launched by Spectrum. Fin-buzz is a combination of both media and financial analytics. Fin-buzz allows stock traders and investor relations professionals to track the effects of media sentiment on share prices in real-time.

Spectrum is a Birst customer -- Fin-buzz is based on Birst’s on-demand business intelligence solution.

To learn more about Fin-buzz, check out the website. They have more compelling reports available there.

To learn more about Spectrum as a Birst customer, check out today's press release.

Marketing effectiveness - the data you already have, analyzed.

2009-05-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

Previously, I was writing about the strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and their recent flurry of articles about marketing in a downturn (see “Measuring Marketing” and “The downturn’s new rules for marketers”). One of the fascinating facts in the first article is that less than 20% of companies actually quantitatively analyze their data on marketing spend. This is despite the fact that over 60% of companies reported that they did indeed track media, personnel, and creative costs.

They have the data - they just don't analyze it.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="330" caption="To think you had all of that data and just needed a way to put it together."][/caption]

So the hidden message from the article is that the answers for achieving better marketing effectiveness are probably in your hands already. You have the data. The issue just becomes how can you connect it all together and analyze it? And how can you do that quickly?

Marketing can be particularly tough to analyze, for the following reasons:

There are many different types of marketing activities to analyze. Even small companies do online advertising, print advertising, webinars, in-person events, etc. All of these activities involve different and multiple vendors, such as creative designers, media outlets, marketing consultants, etc.

There are a lot of different data sources to analyze. Each activity, with each vendor, produces different data that resides in different places. Running search ads on Google and Yahoo? Two data sources. Did email blasts with 5 different media lists? 5 different data sources.

Marketing impact can be tough to manage, because it might be measured in multiple places. That online advertising results in hits to your website, online signups, calls to the sales team, etc. How can you track all of those different impacts in one place?

So it makes sense that while over 60% of companies have the data, only 20% of them go through the time and effort to analyze it. Especially if you're using traditional analysis solutions, it can be expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to tie all of these data sources together.

This is where on-demand business intelligence solutions can come in. A modern solution that makes it easier to pull information from disparate sources and analyze it in one place, for a more affordable cost, becomes critical.

At Birst, we have Birst Connect, which allows you to automatically pull information from various databases and data sources on a regular basis, according to the schedule that you set. For something like marketing analytics, that dramatically alleviates the burden of data integration.

So instead of having to be concerned about the tying together of information, marketing managers can focus on simply ensuring that the data can be tied together. It's a task, but a much smaller one than doing things manually, which is what many people are doing today, or not doing it at all, which is a risky path in today's economy.

For more on marketing reporting and analysis, check out the Marketing Analytics section on the updated Birst website. You can also check out this free recorded webinar called "Put Marketing in the Driver's Seat."

Birst named a finalist for the Red Herring 100

2009-04-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

Birst is honored to announce that it is a finalist for the "Red Herring 100 North America" award, a prestigious list honoring the year's most promising private technology ventures in North America.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of 1,200. Nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

There is a lot of excitement here at Birst about being named a finalist, and we're looking forward to presenting our accomplishments at the Red Herring conference where the final winners are named.

We consider this a validation not only of our company and technology, but of the value that we are providing to our customers. Helping customers to solve their business challenges and achieve greater success is what drives us, and its great to see that, with this nomination, our customers' achievements are also being recognized.

This honor comes as the wave for on-demand business intelligence seems to be rising, as independent analyst Merv Adrian noted in a recent post.

As the saying goes, "Watch this space."

McKinsey on marketing: you already have the data to achieve marketing effectiveness.

2009-04-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

The strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has recently come out with a series of articles on marketing measurement and approaching marketing in a downturn (see "Measuring Marketing" and "The downturn's new rules for marketers"), which are both good reads.

What I appreciate about McKinsey & Co. is its dedication to management by metrics and hard facts. As a result, they can come up with some interesting nuggets about how companies are doing in this current economic conundrum. For example, their survey in January showed that marketing expenses are being cut less frequently than operating expenses are - 75% of companies are reporting operating expense cuts, while only 45% of companies are reporting marketing cuts. Not a cause for jubilation, but it's heartening to see that marketing is still seen as vital. 20% of companies are actually increasing marketing spend.

McKinsey can also come up with some no-nonsense suggestions about better management, such as:

"To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles to reach them."

"Such extreme uncertainty demands constant attention, frequent reprioritization, and strategies that anticipate and respond to a changing landscape."

If you're a marketer, or a data-friendly person, you're probably saying "Amen" right now. Such suggestions are solid, but can hardly be called new. The only shift has been the intensity and urgency of the need to quantify and analyze information.

And if you're a marketer, you'll probably laugh when you get to the article sections showing how some large, well-funded companies with access to lots of detailed information and fancy analysis systems are evaluating their customer base to a deeply detailed level.

"Sure," you're probably thinking, "Data is great, measurements and KPIs are great, but McKinsey is consulting for large, big-budget companies with hot-rod systems already. What am I supposed to take away from this?"

Well, the sneaky point that the article glosses over is that the "Measuring Marketing" article also has a chart showing that less than 20% of companies actually quantitatively analyze their data on marketing spend. It's not that these companies don't have the data. Over 60% of companies reported that they track media, personnel, and creative costs. It's just that they don't analyze it.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="375" caption="You already have the data. It's how you put it together for meaning."][/caption]

So the big takeaway from the article is that the answers for achieving better marketing effectiveness are probably in your hands already. You have the data. The issue just becomes how can you connect it all together and analyze it? And how can you do that quickly?

To be continued. . .

**

And yes, we upgraded our website. Let us know what you think! We even added a section on marketing analytics and reporting.

Let's get real - it's about the department, not just the enterprise

2009-03-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing the last conversation about the issues raised in Doug Henschen's Information Week article called Business Intelligence Gets Smart. The first thing that was really noticeable was the emphasis that big companies placed on ease of use and affordability for even their enterprise deployments. Today I'd like to talk about the second observation from his article- many enterprise deployments are really departmental deployments.

Yes, many companies have the ultimate vision of the universal BI implementation that touches all data, providing glorious real-time dashboards to executives, relevant reports to managers, and critical slices of data to front-line employees. It's a wonderful vision. It's also expensive, complex, and time consuming, and it's not really clear that anyone's even gotten close to it yet. Valiant attempts have been made, and those attempts are yielding value, but the vision is yet unfulfilled.

Reality is something different. More companies are approaching their business intelligence needs in a more tactical, concrete way. They want something that's faster to deploy, easier to use, and provides tangible value quickly. Take a look at Doug's chart, below.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="298" caption="Departments outnumber the enterprise."][/caption]

A few quick takeaways:

67% of companies are using BI in one or just a handful of departments.

Only 11% have a "pervasive deployment."

Especially in the difficult economic environment that we have today, companies are going to think carefully and tactically about their technology investments, and BI will be no different. What we are already seeing is a heightened interest in departmental or cross-departmental solutions, linking together information from marketing, sales, and finance, for example, so that executives can see campaign to pipeline to revenue.

It also explains the increasing interest in departmental level BI solutions, such as in-memory analytics and on-demand business intelligence. I covered what "easier business intelligence" is last time, so I just want to repeat two points - integration and scalability. The vision of the overarching business intelligence deployment continues to be a worthy goal. Organizations will just build departmentally to get there.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="288" caption="Running a three legged race with 2 people is easier than an 8 legged race with 7 people. Just be sure you can do the latter if you want to go there."][/caption]

In order to ensure that your business intelligence solution is still valid as you grow, your resources and capabilities improve, or your data expands, you just need to pick a solution that can pull together disparate systems and easily scale.

So when independent analyst David Raab conducts a webinar asking "Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?" the "Get Smart" chart leads me to believe that more people will be raising their hands to say that yes, it does.

Big companies need "easy" and "affordable" BI too, says Doug Henschen

2009-03-02T05:03:00.000-08:00

Someone recently drew my attention to an Information Week article by Doug Henschen entitled Business Intelligence Gets Smart. In it, he covers a number of BI success stories as well as some results of a BI survey. The results are so fascinating, I think I'll do a few posts on it, starting today.

The first thing that really spoke to me was the listing of impediments to BI success. While Lyndsay Wise just did an article pointing to ease of use and affordability as the main desires of small and medium sized businesses, Doug points out that big BI implementations share the same desire.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="291" caption="The "Why I Need a Beer" list of the BI battle scarred."][/caption]

Complexity of BI tools and interfaces have a magnifying effect in an implementation:

Complexity chews up IT time and expertise

It drives up the consultant budget

It makes it harder for business end users to use, so that BI is not as broadly used or helpful as it could be.

Complexity rebounds back on IT, which ends up having to make more reports and dashboards for the business users.

Like complexity, cost also has a negative multiplying effect:

High cost means that you can spread BI to fewer users, limiting its effects

HIgh cost encourages smaller departments to go with their own tactical BI implementations, leading to vendor creep. This works for the department in the short term, but can make things difficult if those various vendors don't integrate well with each other.

High cost drives down ROI and is a sore point in this economic climate, making it difficult to get future projects approved.

Just to clarify, it's not necessarily bad to have multiple vendors or focus on departmental/tactical BI. Even Howard Dresner, the guru of the BI industry, emphasizes the need for a "portfolio approach" to business intelligence across an organization. The issue is when *every* department is using different vendors and it's hard to either scale these implementations or link them together sensibly. It makes sense to do those quick, easy wins, but with a vendor that can scale, handle multiple data sources, and easily extend to other departments.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="262" caption="Why can't I get easy and affordable too?"][/caption]

So what is easier business intelligence? For us at Birst, that means easier for IT and easier for the business user:

Having a solution that better integrates data sources

It automates more of the implementation phase of BI, easing the pain

Fast implementation, so that benefits accrue quickly

Designed for use by business users- an easier to understand interface, easy dashboards, ability to export toPDF or Excel

Capable of advanced analytics, but only showing that complexity when really necessary

Scalable, from a group/department level to the entire enterprise

When you also factor in the desire for affordability, I expect that even the largest companies will express interest in easier, budget-friendly BI this year.

Gather snowflakes into a snowball - targeting the midmarket in ways that they understand

2009-02-24T05:58:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of the February 19, 2009 post on midmarket business intelligence.

So how can one look at the midmarket? How can all of these snowflakes make sense?

While it's tempting to categorize by employee size or revenue (and yes, we at Birst often categorize them that way, too), it's not how the market views itself.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="421" caption="Look, I found one that wants HR analytics."][/caption]

While I mentioned last time that nobody has ever come up to me saying "I have 20 employees and $X revenues; I'm an SMB and I need SMB BI," I have run into many companies saying "I need something to make better sense of my sales and financial information. It's too complex for me to do on my own anymore, and I don't have a big IT team to help out." This is usually followed up by "And my budget is kind of small and I'm really not overly technical myself. I really can't afford (enter Big BI company name here)."

In October, Aberdeen did a review of the BI midmarket and found that small and medium sized businesses were essentially interested in 2 things:

1. Easy to use business intelligence

2. Affordable business intelligence

You're absolutely shocked, I'm sure.

What I've discovered is that the midmarket understands its needs, its wants, and its budget, and approaches it that way: I need sales analytics, I want it to be easy for me to use without too much trouble, and I have this much money to spend.

So to cater to the midmarket, you need to address their pain points, to make things easy for them to get started and use, and then provide it at the right price.

Which brings me back to Lyndsay Wise's observation that on-demand business intelligence solutions are the “best poised to meet the needs of small and medium businesses.” While she attributed this to familiarity with the on-demand model, there might be more at work here.

On-demand business intelligence meets the need for BI that is fast to deploy, easy to use, and resource friendly. It generally costs less in terms of time, capital, and labor to get started.

On-demand business intelligence also tends to be geared to the business user instead of the IT user, so it's easier to use - the learning curve is much shorter. As a result, more people can use it in the organization and the benefits spread more broadly.

Some on-demand BI vendors are function-specific and focus on sales analytics applications, for example. While others integrate data from a variety of sources and can be used for sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc., or for looking across the business and reviewing how all of these components interrelate.

As it turns out, the beautiful diversity of snowflakes can be categorized. And they tend to group themselves on their own. Snowflakes are clear, cold, crystalline, and sticky - which makes them easy to turn into snowballs.

Snowflakes aren't completely different - Lyndsay Wise on BI in the midmarket

2009-02-19T03:46:00.000-08:00

Historically, the midmarket has had to go without BI due to resource constraints and lack of IT expertise. Only the largest and most technically sophisticated companies could afford or were capable of implementing traditional on-premise BI. And even then, it often went to the most elite users.

Today, there are a seeming bounty of vendors trying in various ways to approach the midmarket. But what is the midmarket? And what do they really need and want?

As Lyndsay Wise discusses in her recent piece, Redefining the Midmarket and its Business Intelligence Requirements, the midmarket can be hard to characterize. It is often described by the rough metrics of revenue size or employee size. But is that how they see themselves? Or how they characterize their BI needs?

I have yet to meet a person who comes up to me and says "I'm an SMB company with SMB BI needs."

So it's not surprising when Lyndsay says "There is a lack of cohesion existing in the market in terms of what small and mid-sized companies really need to make business intelligence successful. . . there is little agreement on the similarities within mid-sized companies and the key requirements needed for their BI needs."

Seth Grimes agreed and responded in his Slicing up the BI Market posting that perhaps segmenting companies by IT spending, how IT is managed (components or enterprise?), or analytical styles is a better way to go.

So is the midmarket like snowflakes? Each individual one different, unique, and challenging to classify?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="329" caption="Surely we can come to some common agreement about business intelligence."][/caption]

Or are there some similarities that can help vendors and customers find each other? All snowflakes, after all, are crystals, cold, and clear.

Out of the various vendors, Lyndsay saw on-demand business intelligence solutions as the "best poised to meet the needs of small and medium businesses." She attributed this to familiarity with the on-demand model. But is this all that's going on?

To be continued.

Decision centered BI, made for real humans - Stephen Few raises the cry

2009-02-17T02:50:00.000-08:00

Stephen Few raised an interesting point on his blog recently with a piece entitled "Business Intelligence -It's time to pass the baton" The key point, which I will quote directly, is that "[BI] has provided a powerful technical infrastructure for collecting, integrating, improving, storing, and accessing large amounts of information, but few tools that directly help people understand and make good use of that information." This battle cry raised a nice conversation among some BI pros like James Taylor. Over at datadoodle, Ted Cuzzillo amplified the roar.

Stephen's point is spot on. Despite its own statements that it's breaking free, traditional BI doesn't reach broadly enough in the organization to have as great an impact as it could possibly have. Better data visualization and greater ease of use would be of tremendous value here.

Instead of "passing the baton" on to data visualization alone, however, I'd like to suggest a slightly different analogy. The "baton" implies that the first runner isn't important after it's handed off to the next. Instead, it's more like a bobsled team. There needs to be both a driver and the runner who gets the bobsled going. The runner is the BI infrastructure. But the driver, who is critical once the runner is in the sled, is the one who navigates you to the swift and speedy destination. That's the decision support/data exploration/data visualization part.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Everybody focus on the business objective, now."][/caption]

The heavy data lifting and calculating needs to be tied to better data visualization that's easier for business users to use. While the fancy visualizations are slick and cool, you have to have the data properly gathered and analyzed to get there and oy, there's the rub.

So I must humbly suggest that in addition to the vendors who focus on visualization, like Tableau and Panopticon, you might see a nice bobsled team from the vendors who are focused on making BI more affordable and approachable in general. The on-demand business intelligence vendors, of which Birst is one, are combining the runner with the driver to make BI both easy and effective within organizations.

5 Hot Business Intelligence Topics for 2009 - a belated shout out to the Dashboard Spy

2009-02-13T02:46:00.000-08:00

It's fascinating to us here at Birst how many customers come to us with a first request of "I want a dashboard." Not "I want BI." Not "I want better analytics and reporting across my financial, CRM, and operating data." Not "I want to mine my data from here to Timbuktu." No. They might want those things, but it's not the first thing they ask for. It's "I want a dashboard." Some customers who know that they have a reporting problem and have no idea what BI is still know what a dashboard is and know that they want it.

That's why I'm giving a belated shout out to the Dashboard Spy.

Hubert Lee, the Dashboard Spy, put together 5 Hot Business Intelligence Topics for 2009. Here it is in quick summary. It's worth a full look especially if, you know, you want a dashboard.

"While exchanging New Year’s greetings with many Dashboard Spy readers and contributors, I found certain “top-of-mind” topics appearing on everyone’s list. In this post, I share 5 of what will most certainly be the hottest topics of discussion when discussing business intelligence dashboards in 2009.

Dashboard Topic #1

“Business Intelligence, the recession-proof application”

Corporate spending has ground to a halt. This has impacted in a dramatic way the world of IT where, even in the best of times, we have to work hard at proving ROI and business justification. IT managers now are scraping by with reduced staff and application funding. However, I’ve received reports from quite a few organizations where business intelligence dashboard budgets survive. In fact, a few new dashboard reporting projects received the go-ahead despite cutbacks on other technology spending.

Dashboard Topic #2

“The Power of The Mash-Up Dashboard”

2009 will be a break out year for mashup dashboarding.

The mashup dashboard takes a mix and match approach to enterprise dashboard content that provides a real user-centric focus. Think combination of business intelligence applications, reporting engines and web portals.

In 2009, more companies than ever will make their databases and application engines available for use across the internet. While TOS (Terms of Service) agreements will be in effect, the access to the data is generally granted at no cost. This has opened the world of the enterprise dashboard and made the dashboard design pattern a smorgashboard of content from a range of data providers. This “mash-up” of content serves up unique combinations of dashboard content for the ever-hungry dashboard end user. Once they’ve tasted the mash-up dashboard, there’s no going back.

Dashboard Topic #3

“The Unavoidable Dashboard” or “Here Come the Widgets!”

For organizations to achieve real returns on their business intelligence efforts, there is one startlingly simple requirement - “Get the data in front of the manager”.

From the forward edge of business dashboard techniques comes the idea of desktop dashboards. With the end user now getting comfortable with widgets and gadgets (those mini applications that appear on your PC or Mac as part of the windows environment), we will see more and more adoption of this technique to deliver business intelligence.

Dashboard Topic #4

“The Eye Candy Controversy, Continued”

Several dashboarding platforms released upgrades during 2008 that take graphics to a new level. Flash-based bling and web 2.0 styling is here to stay. “Create your own dashboard” software now makes it extremely easy to add all the glitz and chrome you want to your business intelligence interface. Project sponsors who want to show slickness love this functionality but the information visualization best practice crowd is choking on their pie charts and loading up their bullet graphs. The “eye candy” versus “clarity of data visualization” controversy will no doubt continue to grow in 2009.

As a dashboard adoption observer and business intelligence industry reporter, I will state my opinion that at this point of the maturity curve of business dashboards, it’s great that the dashboard end user or department level dashboard builder has the technology available to produce great looking visual interfaces for business intelligence. Yes, there are plenty of “wrong” practices out there, but I’d rather enjoy this frenzy of do-it-yourself dashboarding than to wait forever for IT and their data visualization experts to get something “right”.

Dashboard Topic #5

“The Rise of the InfoGraphic”

2008 was a banner year for infographics. I mean that literally. News sites such as the New York Times have set up considerable resources for the production and prominent display of data-driven information graphics. As explained in this interview with the NY Times Graphics Director Steve Duenes, information graphics are taken quite seriously.

For Hubert's full analysis click here.

For examples of business intelligence dashboards that you can create quickly and easily with Birst, visit theTours and Demos section of Birst.com.

David Raab asks the big question: "Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?"

2009-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

If there's an elephant in the room, analyst David Raab is not shy about pointing it out. It's a big question -- and very likely the same question that a lot of business and IT managers are asking themselves as they think about their 2009 goals. In the past few years, a number of new vendors offering "on-demand business intelligence" have popped up and David's article does a fine job of identifying their different approaches.

I highly recommend reading the entire article, but if you only catch the big conclusion at the end, that's worth it, too. Here's the excerpt:

"Although the jury is still out, I believe the answer is yes. . . the greatest potential lies with automated tools and analytical databases. These should let developers create an integrated process that requires little effort from the vendor or its clients, and is substantially more flexible and cheaper than conventional alternatives."

The shift to on-demand business intelligence, no matter which vendor you choose, is something that we are cheering for in 2009. Customers now have more choices, and the opportunity for more flexible and affordable business intelligence.

Peering into 2009 and seeing an on-demand world

2009-01-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

Shawn Rogers of the BeyeNetwork posted his twtpoll on how new technology is expected to influence Business Intelligence in 2009. From his results, below, it's not surprising to see that the BI cognoscenti expect 2009 to be the year of Software as a Service (SaaS).

You can take Shawn's poll by clicking here.

Part 2: Why don't pre-built applications solve the problem?

2008-12-12T01:23:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of “Why is BI so broken?”

In an effort to make BI solutions less painful to deploy, some software providers have brought analytical applications to market that are based solely on specific data sources, like Salesforce or Oracle financials. The fundamental thinking behind this approach is: if it is so painful for customers to manually integrate and develop their own BI applications, wouldn’t it be easier if our organization just pre-built those manual configurations for them?

This was the fundamental value proposition behind the Sales Analytics Application family I developed while back at Siebel. Essentially, I used existing BI tools to create an out-of-the-box BI solution for the generic Siebel data model, including pre-configured ETL, data-warehouse, metadata, reports, and dashboards. The market responded so strongly to the promise of BI solutions that could be turned on in weeks that the product family grew from almost nothing to over $40 million a year in license revenue in just 3 years.

Pre-configuration doesn’t address the actual problem

The unfortunate reality, however, was that few companies (shhh!) actually used generic Siebel. Most organizations had taken advantage of Siebel’s metadata-driven application to highly configure their Siebel application, creating unique data models with custom objects and fields. This meant that the pre-built ETL, data-warehouse, metadata, reports and dashboards all had to be modified to reflect the actual data model employed by the customer.

In addition, most companies wanted to include some non-Siebel data in their data-warehouse (most commonly, this was back office sales data, since the Opportunity information typed in by a sales rep did not necessarily match the actual revenue the company received). This meant that the ETL, data-warehouse, metadata, reports, and dashboards had to be further modified to reflect this broader set of data that better captured the actual performance of the business.

Given the scale and scope of these changes for most companies, the speed-to-market benefit of buying a pre-built application quickly eroded. Most organizations found themselves facing the many months’ deployment timeline typical of most BI solutions. In short, masking the shortcomings of BI solutions by pre-configuring them doesn’t actually make the shortcomings go away.

“Pre-built” SaaS analytical applications don’t solve the problem, either

It is interesting to note that the market success of Siebel’s Analytical Applications has inspired several Software-as-a-Service companies to develop Analytical Applications that are limited to known data sources – most typically Salesforce.com. They are hoping that the promise of quick and easy BI will have similar success in the SaaS space as it did in the on premise.

While the basic idea seems sound and may generate revenue in the short term, I strongly suspect that those vendors (most of whom use existing open source tools like J-Pivot and Mondrian) will have a hard time meeting customer needs in the long run, because they still have to manually integrate and manage a solution across a highly fragmented stack. This means that these providers will struggle to adapt to each customer’s customized Salesforce data model and will likely be unable to cost-effectively integrate data from outside of Salesforce into the solution – thereby limiting the overall value of the system. I, for one, am very interested to see how the “pre-built” SaaS Analytical Application model fares.

Why is BI so broken?

2008-11-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

Traditional BI solutions are painful, risk-prone, and slow to implement. They require significant investments of money, time, and people, yet still experience high failure rates. As a result, small and medium sized businesses can’t afford BI and large businesses are wrestling with runaway costs and disappointing results. Far too often, a CIO is left holding the bag of an overly expensive implementation of just a handful of inflexible reports.

How did this happen? BI is an immense industry – with companies already spending over $18B per year for BI solutions. Despite BI’s unimpressive track record, the promise of better decision-making and more effective management ensures that BI remains among the top priorities for CIOs. BI sales continue to grow, even in tough economic times.

High cost and complexity = limited reach and limited benefits

The expense and risk of traditional BI solutions make it hard for companies to deliver BI capabilities to all but the most critical portions of their organization – leaving many departments and groups without the insight they need to effectively manage their business.

Sadly, even those that parts of the organization that are served by traditional solutions find that once the systems are up and running, they tend to be brittle and expensive to modify and maintain. This makes it hard for a BI solution to keep up with the business’ ever-evolving needs for insight – limiting most solutions’ ability to deliver on the grand vision of better decision-making through insight.

Why? How can an industry so large still make it so hard for customers to succeed?

“Best-of-Breed” approach just breeds high cost and failure

The answer is that the fundamental structure of BI solutions is flawed. The best-of-breed approach that dominates the industry separates the different layers of the BI stack from one another. ETL tools are separate from the data mart, OLAP servers are separate from reporting servers, which are often separate from dashboarding products, and so on.

This menagerie of software products, each requiring different skill sets and expertise, needs to be hand stitched together by IT every time. The communication and coordination costs alone of this approach – never mind the hardware, software and development costs – are staggering. The cost of failure is high, since a mistake in any one layer can compromise the entire system. Given this structure, it is not surprising that many implementations fail. Those that do launch successfully have a hard time keeping up with the ever-changing needs of the business, since each change has to be reflected over and over again in all of the effected layers.

An integrated price list does not mean an integrated solution

Lately, larger players have tried to address customer demands for an integrated solution by buying up companies to fill out the other layers in the stack. Unfortunately for the customers, this approach just produces an integrated price list; the products are all listed together on one page, but they are not actually integrated technically. The cost and complexity of integration is just as much of a problem as it was before, and the customer’s desire for an integrated solution is not met.

Next: Why "BI Applications" don't necessarily solve the problem.

A new paradigm for customer value, Part 3 of 3

2008-11-11T10:17:00.000-08:00

Part 3: Business Intelligence in a true SaaS model

In the last installment, this blog covered how, in general, the SaaS model provides superior customer benefits and aligns the vendor with the customer.

It also showed how providers of SaaS-based operations software, such as CRM or ERP, quickly discovered the difficulty of incorporating analytics using traditional vendors. It is clear that these operational SaaS vendors require a true SaaS business intelligence partner in order to be successful and meet customer needs.

It is harder to create a SaaS BI solution than a SaaS operational solution like CRM

Providing business intelligence in a true SaaS model is a fundamentally more difficult problem than developing an operational application like CRM in a SaaS model. This increase in difficulty is due to the fact that business intelligence inherently requires the integration of data from other applications. This integration can be very costly when performed using traditional business intelligence tools.

Early SaaS BI solutions try to sidestep the issue

In an effort to minimize this expense, most on-demand BI vendors have focused on creating packaged BI applications built on a few set tables within a known SaaS application, typically Salesforce.com. However, because most SaaS BI applications are built using existing toolkits, typically including J-Pivot and Mondrian, the out-of-the-box applications are expensive and painful to customize as they fall victim to the same economics of the existing behind-the-firewall solutions. This short-coming is particularly painful for SaaS solutions since one of the greatest value propositions for SaaS software is its ease of configuration, making a rigid BI application completely unsuitable.

What *true* SaaS BI has to deliver for success

For business intelligence to be successful in the SaaS model, it must not only deliver more value than the traditional behind-the-firewall approach, it must also change the economics of BI delivery. It must be a full featured solution that is quick to deploy, scalable, easy to use, and lower in cost. Achieving this requires the following:

Providing automation for the most painful and laborious aspects of BI configuration – data preparation, integration, and metadata management

Automating the operational elements associated with BI deployments

New user provisioning

Addition of new data sources

Modification of existing data sources

New customer provisioning

Application replication (taking an existing configuration and re-using and deploying for another customer/deployment)

Upgrade management

Also, a SaaS BI solution should provide the key functional components that most BI consumers expect:

Ability to consolidate data from multiple sources

Ability to provide the full range of business intelligence end-user interfaces (operational reporting/banded reporting, dashboards, OLAP/slice-dice/pivot, alerting, etc.)

Ability to grow with an organization in terms of scale and complexity (number of data sources, complexity of calculations, diversity of end-user scenarios)

Vendors claiming to be SaaS BI have been around for many years now. But true SaaS BI vendors are in fact quite rare. You’re looking at one of them.

A new paradigm for customer value, Part 2 of 3

2008-10-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

Part 2: The SaaS approach emerges, bringing economic benefits through the restructuring of software

As the flaws in the ASP model were gradually being exposed, a second generation of vendors began to emerge. These vendors did not take traditional enterprise software and try to force it into a hosted world. Instead, they created new software platforms fundamentally designed for on-demand delivery that had the following characteristics:

· One, single version (with automated upgrades)

· A single, consolidated platform (the entire software stack)

· One target environment

· One deployment methodology

· Automated customer provisioning (new customers were simply turned on)

· Less configuration, more automation. Users were offered simpler versions of the applications that satisfied the 80/20 rule, but radically reduced the configuration burden.

By rationalizing the problem and providing a stack that automates the provisioning, maintenance, and normal plumbing that goes along with the implementation and maintenance of software, SaaS fundamentally changed the economics of software delivery. You may not be able to fully tweak every piece of the software, but people have discovered that most often, they don’t really need to. Instead of selling the kit to build the car, these companies sell the entire vehicle pre-assembled.

SaaS model aligns vendor and customer incentives

Moreover, since SaaS providers incur the cost of maintenance, operations and management, they are driven to reduce these costs. It has been said that only 20-30% of the total cost of a software platform is license cost – the remainder is the cost of implementing, managing, and operating the software (people, hardware and other resources). By focusing on this previously ignored part of the software value chain, SaaS providers can dramatically shift the value equation.

Operational SaaS is a success – but then there’s the BI problem. How do you analyze the resulting data?

As mentioned earlier, software companies that provide operational applications (e.g., CRM, ERP) embraced the SaaS model first. After a few years of growth and customer expansion, customers had accumulated a significant amount of business critical data in their operational solutions and naturally demanded analytical solutions for reporting. Since analyzing data directly against an operational database can be catastrophic, vendors began searching for analytics partners.

SaaS operational vendors try to partner with traditional analytics solutions – with unimpressive results

Although these operational companies were based on the SaaS model, many of the potential partner vendors that they evaluated were traditional, behind-the-firewall BI solutions that were already established in the analytics industry. Unfortunately, these traditional analytics vendors did not have true SaaS offerings, or were struggling to have their traditional model wedged into a SaaS-like delivery. As a result, the operational software SaaS players were partnered with sub-optimal solutions.

Most often, the analytics partners’ setup costs and deployment method limited the SaaS vendor to the custom, one-off software delivery business when it came to analytics; they lost the compelling economics of their mainline businesses. In a way, the analytics component ended up as a one-off consulting organization, an inefficient adjunct to the more scalable SaaS operational software model. The takeaway is clear: mixing software models doesn’t work. A SaaS vendor can’t redeem a traditional BI partner, and a traditional BI partner can’t add much value to a SaaS vendor.

Stay tuned for Part 3: Business Intelligence in a true SaaS model

Election hounds and pollster politicos - our "click around" demos are up

2008-10-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Birst website now features the ability to preview what it feels like to use Birst - without even registering or using a password. Just click on the link to the demo and check out dashboards and reports right away.

These demos are located on the Tours and Demos page. Click here (http://www.birst.com/tour-demo.php)

For you election junkies, we have a demo with some great data on how the 2004 Presidential election broke out by state and congressional district. We've also included the demographic data for that congressional district from the 2000 Census, so that you can see not only how a district voted, but how it breaks down by ethnicity, gender, income, etc. Slice and dice the data any way you like, filter reports to see exactly the data you want, change the way you look at the world. To go straight to this demo, click here.

If you're more of the armchair CEO type, we have a demo showing results for an imaginary company. Or if you're a baseball fan, we have a number of charts and statistics on baseball history.

And as always, let us know what you think. Email us at feedback@birst.com

A new paradigm for customer value: how Software-as-a-Service Business Intelligence offers more for less, faster

2008-10-22T02:31:00.000-07:00

This three part series explores how software has moved from traditional solutions to SaaS and how the customer is finally getting the value that they need from BI delivered on-demand.

Part 1: The ASP model offers high hopes, but ultimately low value

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model is attracting significant attention from both customers and investors, since SaaS promises to fundamentally change the economics and customer value of software. As a result, customers are increasingly turning to SaaS vendors for software solutions and publicly traded SaaS companies are receiving valuations far above those of traditional software vendors.

To understand why a SaaS model is so compelling, it’s first important to understand the limitations of another business model – that of application service provider (ASP).

The ASP Model – placing traditional software on the web

In the late 1990s and very early 2000s, the application service provider model was very popular. The theory was: take software traditionally delivered via CD-ROM and deliver it in a pre-configured, hosted model to create cost benefits for the vendor and customer. It was thought that by packaging the applications in this manner that the following would happen:

Economies of scale in operations could be achieved

Customer configuration demands would be limited

Deployments of new customers could be streamlined

If these things were accomplished, one could alter the economics of software delivery.

However, this model suffered from some critical flaws.

The critical flaw: the same software that was designed for customer installation and configuration was being used for hosted operation. Many of the design trade-offs that software vendors had made favored extreme configurability. This allowed them to answer “yes” to feature/requirement requests from customers by essentially pushing back onto the customer the burden of installing and configuring the software.

The economics of traditional licensed software created strong incentives to discount the operational burdens of the customer and create half-features that, in order to become fully functional, required the customer to finish the job with services. In the traditional software model, the customer didn’t realize their obligations and added expense until well after the software is purchased. This is a critical reason for the disillusionment with enterprise software that has taken place over the last decade.

The ASP model essentially required that the hosting provider finance the cost of customer configurations. Instead of improving the economics for the vendor, it actually made the economics of software worse. In fact, it has been argued that customers of ASP solutions demanded more from their ASP providers than they would have of their own internal IT had they relied on the internal organization for delivery. These costs far outweighed any economic gains from standardizing operations and scaling up support staff.

The end-result: the ASP model did not create any economic benefits over a traditional software delivery model. The total cost of software delivery was shifted a bit, but not changed (if anything it got worse). ASP providers ended being sold-off and treated more as a conventional outsourcing option. Customers did not see a significant reduction in cost or improvement in service.

Business Intelligence walks into the ASP trap

History has shown that every architectural shift in computing begins first in operational applications and then moves to the Business Intelligence market about 5-7 years later. The same seems to be true for the shift to the ASP hosted model. The first generation of ASP companies provided operational applications. BI providers followed later -- several attempted to take the same software that they sell via CD-ROM and provide a hosted alternative. Despite calling themselves “SaaS,” these offerings are essentially the ASP business model. As a result, they have encountered the same challenges that ASP providers of operational applications experienced; they are having a difficult time providing compelling value for a compelling price.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The SaaS approach emerges for operational software

Now what do we do? Ask Birst.

2008-09-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Like many other people, you’ve probably been watching the markets tumble downwards in the past few weeks and started wondering, what comes next? And shortly after that, what do I do about all of this? How should I move forward?

Now is the time to take stock of your business and think carefully about the strategic moves you’ll make in the upcoming months. In order to make those decisions, though, you need solid information about your customers and business. That’s where business intelligence comes in. BI can give you insight into the drivers of revenue and costs, tell you which markets have the largest opportunities, or where to stop investing your efforts and resources.

Historically, BI solutions have been very expensive and difficult to use, requiring large sums of money and small armies of developers to get started. Now there’s Birst. Birst is the first automated, on-demand BI solution that’s so easy to use that you can get started using it today. By yourself.

Birst is free to get started. If you want fancier features and more application space, you can upgrade to our paid versions. As you’ll see from our pricing, we’re far more affordable than other solutions. And we scale to fit your needs as you grow.

So as you watch the market wobble and wonder how you can afford the insight that will tell you how to best move forward, know now that you can relax and stop wondering. Try Birst.

Birst launched today. Thanks to all of our beta customers and fellow Birst enthusiasts!

Birst moves to open beta

2008-09-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

After a few months in private beta, when we were growing slowly to make sure that we could keep everyone happy with their Birst experience, we're now in open beta. Anyone can sign up immediately, for free, without any special promo code or invitation. Welcome!

Please take Birst for a nice data spin and let us know what you think. Everyone gets free access to Birst Professional during the beta, so you've got all of the fanciest features at your fingertips. You can post feedback in the forums or send us an email at feedback@birst.com.

Thanks for a few decades of patience. Get ready for the new new thing.

2008-09-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, business intelligence is an old category. It's been around in one form or another for decades. Multi-billion dollar companies have successfully been created to try to meet customers' BI needs. And yet those needs are still not fully met.

Traditional BI is expensive, hard to use, inflexible, and, ultimately, disappointing. There is still a large number of people out there who are having a hard time getting the timely, relevant data they need to make important decisions.

That's why we created Birst. It's fast, it's affordable, and it's powerful. And it finally provides an answer to all of those people frustrated with spending hours using Excel trying to approximate a solution, all of those people who have outgrown Excel but can't afford an enterprise BI solution, and all of those people who have an enterprise BI solution but *still* can't get the answers they need. That's a lot of people.

So if you're one of those folks, know that you're not alone. And know that you now have a solution. Welcome to Birst. We hope you like it.