birst product report - media.trustradius.com · page 3 of 13 ©trustradius inc. 2014 3 company...

of 13 ©TrustRadius Inc. 2014

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Birst Product Report November 2014 Based on 20 reviews of Birst on TrustRadius


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About this Report

This report is designed to help you make a more informed, confident decision. It is based upon 20 in-depth authenticated user reviews of Birst on TrustRadius, the leading community for professionals who use business software to exchange candid insights to make smart decisions. The report includes data from reviews on TrustRadius, and independent research. Assessment Criteria Most BI tools share common features. However, the way those capabilities work and how vendors operate are not the same. Here are some factors to keep in mind for your evaluation:

Who they are designed for?

Company size focus: some tools are designed for large enterprises, while others for small or medium businesses.

Full-stack vs discovery and visualization: Different BI tools have been designed with very different audiences in mind. Large full-stack enterprise platforms are designed to provide executives and operational staff with dashboards and reports focused on clearly defined operational metrics. These enterprise tools are centralized platforms for delivering operational data to stakeholders across the enterprise. Setting up these systems requires a high-level of IT sophistication and the participation of data architects, ETL developers, report writers, data warehouse specialists, etc. Discovery and visualization tools designed for analysts and data scientists usually do not require any of this IT support and can be set up and used directly by the users for whom they have been designed.

Viability/future: If they are privately held, what is their level of funding? What is the probability they will remain in business, be acquired? If recently acquired, is the acquirer investing in the product?

User ratings: Ratings are an important guide of user sentiment. They should however be the sole reason to pick a solution. It’s most important to make sure it aligns to you objectives. You can filter Birst reviews by company size, industry etc. on TrustRadius.

Feature set: Feature sets vary widely with some vendors offering a range of product versions aimed at customers of different sizes and levels of sophistication, while others offer a much narrower range of options. Mobile offerings: Many companies are deploying BI applications on mobile devices to meet the needs of executives and managers who travel a lot as well as sales people or traveling technicians and operations managers who manage a store or facility and are constantly walking around supervising activity.

Product Development Focus: Is their focus aligned to your needs? Price: Price ranges from several hundred dollars per month for point solutions to several

hundreds of thousands of dollars for full-stack, enterprise level, on-premise solutions.

https://www.trustradius.com/products/birst/reviews

https://www.trustradius.com/products/birst/reviews


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Company Overview

Company status Privately held History Birst was founded in 2004 by Brad Peters and Paul Staelin and is

headquartered in San Francisco. In April 2014, Birst’s CEO Brad Peters moved aside to become President and

Chief Products Officer. Jay Larson, who has been a sales executive at Oracle, Mercury Interactive and SuccessFactors, and was most recently President of worldwide field operations at Jive, has replaced him as CEO.

The company has raised a total of $84m in venture capital, with the latest round of $26m in 2014.

2013 revenue est. Between $20m and $50m Customers 400 direct customers, 125 embedded (OEM) customers

The product tends to be used by enterprises as a departmental solution, or by small and mid-sized organizations as a company standard. However, customer size has been increasing, with the an increasing number of customers in the $1billion range.

A significant portion of Birst’s business (~25%) is via OEM deals whereby other solution vendors embed the Birst solution in their own products. SaaS software vendors like Autodesk, OpenText and CBS Interactive who embed the software in their own solutions. Most recently, NetSuite’s cloud ERP solution incorporated Birst as its reporting engine

Employees 237 Product Overview Provides a cloud-based full-stack platform for business intelligence and

analytics, with a range of functionality matching that of the more traditional on-premise vendors and including, ETL, a semantic layer, and visualization capabilities through dashboards, operational and ad-hoc reporting, and mobile.

The difference from traditional full-stack solutions is that the data is not removed from its source system but is processed in-situ by the semantic layer. All components share a single unified logical layer of metadata and are accessible from a browser.

Visualizer, released in 2014, is targeted not at business analysts or data scientists, but at non-technical end users like sales directors or product managers who want access to visualization and discovery capabilities using a Google-like search interface and an Amazon-like recommendation engine.


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Product Summary

Birst

Best

Fit

For Those without large IT teams to help with deployment and report writing /

dashboard building required by full-stack systems. Companies that require fast implementation without onerous upfront

investments in hardware and software.

Valu

e Pr

opos

ition

Full-stack BI platform with data warehouse, ETL layer, reporting engine and visualizations all hosted in the cloud.

Short time to value with quick deployment and an intuitive user interface. No disruption to data center and CapEx expense for new hardware /

infrastructure.

Usab

ility

Sleek UI for report design and visualizations. Relatively easy to create data models for data warehouse

Inte

grat

ion

Birst integrates with multiple RDBMS including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase and PostgreSQL. There are also connectors to big data sources like Impala Hadoop Hive, and Cassandra. Additional integrations to OLAP sources such as Microsoft Analysis Services, Hyperion Essbase and business applications Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite and Marketo.

Feat

ure

Set

Self-service, pixel perfect standard reports, dashboards and ad-hoc reporting and report scheduling.

Enterprise Edition includes automated data warehousing and dimensional database management.

Birst Visualizer is a data discovery and visualization tool sitting on top of the common data store that allows all users to build visualizations.

Enterprise version can be deployed on a proprietary on-premise appliance or on SAP HANA.

Native connectors to common business applications. Sophisticated models for system and user security. Standard and Premium support options.

Pric

ing

Birst offers two different editions, “Discovery” which is a more affordable package with a more constrained feature set, and ‘Enterprise” the full-featured package.

Pricing is not published, but is seat-based.


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Comparative User Ratings

Birst scores above the all BI product benchmark on TrustRadius in several key areas, including likelihood to recommend, and likelihood to renew. Training is also a strength. When compared specifically to other Full-Stack solutions it even more strongly.

Birst BI Full-Stack Average BI Average Likelihood to recommend 8.8 7.9 8.5 Likelihood to renew 8.9 8.4 8.4 Product usability 8.3 8.1 8.5 Product Availability 9.3 8.8 9.1 Product Performance 8.0 8.1 8.2 Support rating 8.3 8.5 8.1 In-Person Training 9.3 8.8 8.5 Online Training satisfaction 8.0 8.2 8.0

Implementation satisfaction 8.0 8.2 8.3

Source: In-depth end-user reviews on TrustRadius, N=20

7

7.5

8

8.5

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9.5

Birst BI Full-Stack Average BI Average


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Full-Stack BI Platform TrustMap™ (Traditional and Cloud vendors) The TrustMap™ is an objective visual depiction of full-stack BI vendors on two dimensions: Average User Ratings: The average “Likelihood to Recommend” rating, which is a representation of overall satisfaction, by customers who have written reviews on TrustRadius. All ratings and reviews come from authenticated end-users of the software. Product Evaluation Frequency: Measured by unique page views on TrustRadius of pages associated with a given product. Evaluation frequency is driven by installed base size and growth rate.

Birst is one of the highest-rated products in the entire landscape of full-stack BI products.


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Strengths & Areas For Improvement

The following is a distillation of product strengths and areas for improvement, which emerge from the 20 end-user reviews of the software on TrustRadius.

Strengths Areas for Improvement Data model Very easy to create and validate data

warehouse models. This can be done in hours rather than days as with older BI technology platforms

Mobile The Birst iPad app doesn’t have the full

functionality of the browser-based version. Also, there is no Android version.

Report design and visualization Very easy to design great-looking pixel-

perfect reports and dashboards making it much easier to service internal and external clients. Visualization capabilities are also excellent.

High data volumes There are limitations with data volumes. Too

much data can slow processing or cause reports not to render.

Fast deployment Cloud system makes it very fast to deploy

and system has high availability. Integrating with a wide variety of data sources is fast and easy.

Administration tools / Backend visibility System lacks administration tools for backend

visibility.

Customer Service Professional services and customer

success teams are outstanding and provide excellent guidance.

Documentation Several users comment that if the

documentation were improved they would need less reliance on customer support.


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Customer Mix (Size) Comparison

Based on reviews on TrustRadius, just over half of Birst’s customers are in the Enterprise segment according to our definition of Enterprise as 501+ employees. However, 20% of customers are in the 10,001+ employee category, which probably indicates that departments of very large organizations are adopting the product as an easy to deploy system that is flexible enough to provide departmental reporting capabilities without much help required from IT. Mid-market and enterprise departments are clearly the product’s sweet spot.

Birst Customer Mix (based on 20 reviews on TrustRadius)

Enterprise55%

Mid-Market30%

Small Business

15%


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Most Common Comparisons

Birst is most commonly compared to Tableau Desktop (46%) followed at some distance by GoodData (14%) and QlikView (12%). It is much less often compared with full-stack traditional enterprise platforms. This data is based upon 72,050 page views including 49,524 comparisons on TrustRadius in Q1, 2014.

Birst is most commonly compared to Tableau Desktop (46%) followed by GoodData (14%).


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Interview with Southard Jones, VP Product Strategy

What is your high-level view of the BI market? The best way to classify the market is unfulfilled vendor promises. Forrester published a report saying that only 2% of BI users make decision based on data coming from their enterprise BI systems. 76% make decisions based on either Excel or some home-grown program involving writing custom SQL

queries against a database. For the last 20 years, all the BI systems that people have deployed, haven’t really worked. The old legacy solutions are relegated to being reporting tools and not decision making tools. Their era has passed. Enterprise warehouses are being used to report things to executives, and are the systems of record, but they are not being used to help people make better decisions. This has given rise to the discovery tools. These tools are great at giving end users Excel like analysis or mining capability to look for nuggets of gold in a massive amount of data. The challenge with these tools is that they are confined to people who actually know how to work with data which is a pretty small population in most businesses. And they create the problems that BI tools were originally trying to solve – they create data silos. Within market you have users buying for different situations, but nobody is really helping companies become truly data driven. Where does Birst fit into this landscape? We have a fundamentally different point of view. The real purpose of BI as a decision making aid is being lost and a lot of people today buy BI solutions to solve a reporting deficiency, or get a better picture of my data. We believe BI is about helping every person in the company down to the shipping clerk, to use data to make better decisions. Our product architecture and training and everything we do is all built around that. We also believe that there are two problems to solve in enterprise BI. There’s the data problem and there’s the UI problem. You can’t solve one or the other. You have to solve both. You can’t just create a great front end and lets someone else worry about the data for analysis, or conversely, worry about the data layer and let some else worry about the front end. You have to do them both. We think this should all be done in the cloud. The secret to doing what I just described is in creating a “user ready data tier”. You have enterprise data which is everything out there today. And then you create a user ready data tier which either sits on top of the enterprise data, or we extract if from its sources to bring it together and provide a very


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simple user interface for every possible user, whether you just want to digest a report, or you want to discovery, or you need a highly interactive dashboard, or you want to do analytics on your mobile - but we do all that off one business model or sematic layer. How is this different to the what the legacy vendors do, apart from being in the cloud? Is this just a difference in deployment model, or are there fundamental architecture differences? At first glance it does sound the same. There are three primary differences: First, we don’t require that you to remove your data from its source system. Our semantic layer goes directly to the source system and queries it where it lies. The legacy vendors said “you have to put it in the warehouse, you’ve got to write a bunch of ET scripts, you have to have it designed, and four months later you get your report.” We don’t believe that. The semantic layer knows where the data sits. If it doesn’t need to be combined with other data, we’ll just go directly to it. Second, we don’t feel that it’s necessary to go through this onerous process of building a data warehouse. We do extract and combine data in an automated way using ETL; you can write scripts if you want, but we automate a lot of it. You supply specific business rules, but the data blending is largely automated. Third, our front-end interfaces run off that single business model. The mainline vendors have said that if you want to do predictive, we can do that but it’s a totally different product and if someone wants to do mobile or discovery they offer these tools, but they are a separate query engine and different semantic layer– essentially totally separate products to the rest of the stack. The answer given by the traditional vendors, is ”just put it all in your data warehouse and define your single view of the truth there”? We totally disagree with that. But this is not realistic. It takes far too long to answer the business user’s question. Who is your ideal customer? Two years ago, I would have said that most of our customers are in the mid-market. Now, the opposite is true. Last quarter, 70% of new customers were companies with over $billion in revenue. Our product increases in value as more and more large enterprises use it. American Express, is one example. Another is Reckitt, a $15 billion UK-based CPG company This is probably not entirely representative, but Our sweet spot is $1billion and above. Is BI ever going to move completely to the cloud? You have a new partnership with SAP and sell Birst on the SAP HANA appliance for example. Are there some core sets of customers for whom cloud is never going to be the answer?


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I believe that cloud will move to real cloud architectures: Upgrade in place, no downtime, rapidly deployed, torn down, torn up, moving from user acceptance testing to production with clicks of a button. That’s the thing cloud enables. I believe that architecture will move in that direction. That being said, yes. 25% of our customers deploy our solution in an appliance inside their data center, or inside Amazon’s data center. I agree that you will see a core set of people in perhaps financial services, or government or certain countries that prohibit cloud BI, they will absolutely deploy in their own data center. But they will be saying “I don’t want to pay for an upgrade; I don’t want 50 people to run this, I only need one or two; when I add a new data source to my system, I don’t have to tear it all down and provision a bunch of new servers, etc. Let’s talk about your reviews on TrustRadius. Allow me summarize what the reviews say, and let you react: On the plus side, people say that it’s very easy to create data models and it’s also simple to create great looking reports and dashboards. Visualization capabilities are excellent (with the new Birst Visualizer). Customer service is also stellar – both professional services and customer support. On the “room to improve” side: Some users complain that the iPad app has much less functionality than the browser version – and there is no Android version. There are some complaints with the admin tools where there is reduced visibility into the back end. Also, there are limitations with high data volumes which slows things down and sometimes prevents reports from rendering. A final comment - the documentation is often insufficient. There is nothing very surprising here. The iPad app is not as rich as our main product. We are coming out with a new version of our mobile app in Q4 and it will be both Mac and Android, and will be a significant improvement on what we have today. The current version is a good tool, but it’s not as rich as our front-end. If you are used to our full front-end, it does look a but weak. We’ve hired some new experts to work on this. Regarding data volumes, this was definitely a concern in the past. Our back end was a SQL server 2008 database which was not great at very high data volumes. No though, you can leverage HANA or Amazon Redshift, or SQL Server 2014 which scales up pretty well to 10, 15 or even 20 terabytes – and can be clustered. I don’t expect to hear this from people going forward. The back end visibility is always interesting. We hear this from people who have been in the business a long time and are, for example used to running Business Objects. In that tool, you can go into the database and index it the way you want. We don’t let you do that. Some people don’t like that. But we know the best way to index the database. You can’t query the


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database directly, everything is done through the semantic layer. However, we are releasing some tools for looking at weblogs in a better way. W will continue to work on this. Documentation is not a surprise at all. We do releases every two weeks. It is impossible for documentation to keep out. By the time it’s written it’s out of data. This is somewhat of a challenge. We just hired a new doc writer used to working in this kind of rapid development environment, but the pace at Birst is such that it’s just very hard to keep up. We do have a very active community and people leverage that for undocumented features. This sill probably remain an issue for us though just because of the pace of development. Can you talk about product priorities and the big things you’re working on? We are planning to do a lot more in the mobile are in the coming quarters. This will be a big hit as we are seeing more and more use cases here. The other big area is enterprise features: multi user development, check in / check out, ease of use, administrative back end tools, ability to use different databases for user store (Redshift, HANA etc.). We will continue to invest heavily in Visualizer, but we will also be releasing a front-end dashboarding interactivity model that takes dishoarding to a whole new level and eclipse what’s out there in the market. The paradigm of one person designing a dashboard and publishing to thousands is gone. Dashboarding and discovery will be melded together so that you can explore data and build your dashboard at the same time. About TrustRadius TrustRadius is the leading site for business software users to share real-world insights through in-depth reviews and networking. We help users make better product selection, implementation and usage decisions. Every reviewer is authenticated and every review vetted before publication. Unlike simple rating sites, TrustRadius reviews are structured and substantive, averaging more than 400 words each. Reviewers can also update their reviews to keep them current. Founded by successful entrepreneurs and backed by the Mayfield Fund, TrustRadius is bringing transparency and efficiency to the $3.7 trillion business technology market To learn more, visit www.trustradius.com

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