Birst Turns Big Data Science into Actionable Analytics

SOURCE: Birst

San Francisco, CA, October 17, 2012 – Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced Birst Big Data Services, the industry’s first end-to-end solution to turn large volumes of unstructured data into analytic applications. Big Data Services provides a turnkey analytics infrastructure that eliminates the investment required for Big Data adoption.  By marrying structured and unstructured data, Birst is turning the science of Big Data into analytic applications by correlating user behavior with business outcomes.

“A focus on big data is not a substitute for the fundamentals of information management,” said Anne Lapkin, Research Vice President at Gartner.  “Organizations that substitute activity in the big data space for attention to the basic principles of data quality, information governance and metadata management will continue to suffer from the negative effects on the business that are caused by poor information management practices.” (1)

Birst Big Data Services enables organizations to reap the benefits of Big Data analytics by masking the complexities of having to manage a Hadoop infrastructure and writing MapReduce. The Cloud service provides pre-defined MapReduce routines and a scripting language for distilling information from large volumes of data. Built-in cluster management capabilities ensure organizations can analyze ever-growing volumes of data. Birst’s Cloud BI platform ensures elasticity and ease-of-use with the economics of SaaS.

In addition, Big Data Services allows organizations to:

–        Easily instrument any network-enabled device and application to capture Big Data in Birst. Whether web, mobile, social, video or call center interaction data, such can now be easily measured and analyzed.  Devices and applications send data to Birst directly, via simple HTTP posts.

–        Automate the building of Big Data applications to uncover trends and patterns in unstructured data without having to deal with the cost and complexities of deploying a Big Data infrastructure.

–        Combine unstructured and structured data across multiple data sources and make it actionable through operational and ad hoc reporting, visualizations and publishing to other applications.

“Simplifying our customers’ ability to collect and analyze data, regardless of whether that data is structured or unstructured, is at the heart of Birst’s ability to turn any data into actionable insight,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst.  “This new service moves Big Data out of data scientists’ labs and into the hands of business analysts who have long wanted it, but now can actually use it in their day-to-day operational analysis.”

Birst Big Data Services requires the Birst Enterprise Edition and is priced on a user and data volume basis. It will be generally available later this quarter.

Learn more about Birst and Big Data Services by joining a live webinar entitled “Turn Big Data Science into Actionable Analytics” on Tuesday, November 6, 2012 at 10:00 am PT. Register at http://www.birst.com/bigdataserviceswebinar.

(1) “Hype Cycle for Big Data,” Gartner, July 31, 2012

About Birst
Birst™ is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of your organization’s business analytics and the agility to answer questions spanning departments, data sources, and deployments—across both public and private clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to answer their most pressing business questions, and the ones they didn’t know to ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information, visit www.birst.com or follow us on Twitter @BirstBI.