Birst is one of the premier cloud based BI platforms, with an exceptionally well developed data architecture. This latter is what really distinguishes the product. In the new version 6 release it is leveraging this advantage and providing users with self-service data prep – the task that is typically time consuming and tedious. It is also making some advanced analytics capabilities available through an easy to use interface. These include automated forecasting, and trend line analysis. The addition of machine learning to automate some data prep and analysis tasks just reinforces my own view that BI will become largely automated within half a decade. Here is the press release:
Birst, a leader in Cloud BI and Analytics for the Enterprise, has unveiled Birst 6, the next evolution of its networked business analytics platform that empowers business users to connect to a new level of trusted insights.
With Birst 6, business users can transform raw data into connected insights quickly and effortlessly. Connected insights means people can connect their prepared data to a network of analytics, enriching their own insights and those of others throughout the organization via Birst’s enterprise-scale, multi-tenant cloud architecture. Birst enables people to extend their analytics, data models and visualizations through a seamless, networked integration of data and analytics deployments across their organizations.
The Birst 6 networked business analytics platform will deliver technology capabilities, beginning immediately with connected, end user data preparation (data prep), and throughout 2017. This first release also incorporates machine learning automation features, to make advanced analytics more accessible to a broader audience, and cloud-scale enhancements, to support enterprise-class requirements. Future releases will expand upon these capabilities.
With Birst 6, the company will deliver business analytics that are “Connected,” “Smart,” “Trusted” and “Enterprise Class.”
Connected: Birst Connected Data Prep
Birst’s connected data prep experience enables business users to leverage powerful data blending, transformation, and networking capabilities to prepare data for analytics via an intuitive user interface – all without the need for IT intervention.
Today’s self-service data prep tools and desktop-based visualization products are mainly aimed at data-savvy analysts who are already comfortable manipulating data. In addition, these tools have created disconnected silos of data across the enterprise, resulting in inconsistent information and lack of trust in the decision-making process.
The Birst 6 platform eliminates these silos, while enabling everyday business users to easily access and work with trusted data. They can connect their insights to their company’s network of analytics, for smarter, confident business decisions. With Birst’s Connected Data Prep capabilities, business users can connect, prepare and relate data entirely on their own and regardless of skill.
- Connect: Birst enables business people to access data from multiple sources – files, spreadsheets, databases, cloud-based applications and more – with one click and no IT support required. Birst employs modern RESTful connectors so the experience is fast, reliable and reusable. With Birst, companies can eliminate burdensome data feeds that are difficult to manage and promote inconsistent and inaccurate data.
- Prepare: With Birst Connected Data Prep, business people can cleanse, merge and refine data using an intuitive, visual experience that instantly shows how data is changing with each transformation applied. Drag-and-drop transformations eliminate the need for complicated scripting, and graphical data lineage ensures people can trust what the data means and where it comes from.
- Relate: Birst creates a network of analytics that connects every part of the organization through trusted insights. With Connected Data Prep, business people can take their prepared data and add it to the network, enriching their insights and those of their colleagues. Additionally, new users can look across their network to find and leverage existing insights. Birst automatically generates an analytics semantic layer that delivers transparent governance at business speed, so companies can make decisions with confidence.
Smart: Birst Machine Learning Automation
With Birst’s Machine Learning Automation, enterprises can extend the benefits of advanced analytics to a broader audience, empowering them with the ability to predict outcomes, so they never miss business opportunities. Smart prediction capabilities in Birst 6 will help business people enhance their analysis by forecasting, using trend lines, with just one click.
Birst’s Machine Learning Automation delivers faster time-to-insight, with less human intervention. Machine Learning Automation capabilities are embedded into Birst’s new Connected Data Prep experience, including intelligent defaults for application connectors, usage-pattern discovery of data sources, smart profiling for join recommendations across the Birst network of analytics, and cross-data source sampling for rapid exploration.
Enterprise Class: Birst’s cloud-scale architecture
Birst’s cloud-scale architecture delivers world-class performance on top of a modern, multi-tenant platform that, unlike traditional solutions, has no single bottleneck to hinder performance.
Birst 6 will deliver performance and scalability improvements to support even larger data volumes and concurrency levels. These enhancements include improved data loading and processing speeds, faster response times for queries, visualizations, and dashboards, and Big Data parallel processing for data refinement and transformations. Birst 6 also will introduce data and transformation lineage across the Birst network of analytics.