SAN FRANCISCO — April 8, 2014 — Birst, the leader in Cloud BI, today announced that Birst Visualizer is now available to all customers, making it easy for business users to create, consume, and share data through visually compelling charts and graphs. Birst first introduced the simple, business-oriented visualization tool in December, and following extended early availability, during which it received tremendous positive feedback, has today made it available to all Birst customers. In today’s age of information overload, communicating information in easily digestible and simple formats using pictures and charts is critical to enabling the user to take action against data in a timely manner. Research shows that visually representing data leads to resolution of these challenges.
Birst Visualizer combines Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations to offer business users a fast and easy way to create powerful visualizations, reducing time-to-answer for a wide range of questions about data that has previously been locked within the enterprise. Building on top of Birst’s robust business intelligence platform, Birst Visualizer provides users with the logical finale to reporting and dashboarding capabilities, helping deliver business critical information in a visual format that is integrated across entire data sets and unlocks the power of information across the enterprise. Fully integrated into Birst’s end-to-end cloud platform, Birst Visualizer sits on top of a uniform logical business layer, ensuring that all users draw from the same accurate, business-aware enterprise data. The simple user interface and intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities enable business users – not just data analysts – to harness the power of data visualization.
“With Birst Visualizer, we are raising the bar for BI success. Birst understands how visual representations are an extremely effective way to communicate information and gain new insights into enterprise data. However, not everyone is born with the ‘visualization gene’ needed to transform raw data into compelling visualizations,” said Junaid Saiyed, VP of Engineering and Product Management at Birst. “Our approach is unlike anyone else’s in the market. We leverage consumer design principles and a guided experience to ensure that users who aren’t analytics experts can easily navigate and quickly succeed in gaining insight from their data. ”
How the Birst Visualizer Makes Data Analytics Simple to Create, Consume and Share
As the latest addition to Birst’s industry-leading business intelligence platform, Birst Visualizer adds innovative new ways for users to approach analytics, including:
Intelligent Search Capabilities: Birst Visualizer’s Google-like search capabilities enable users to find the right data using business-relevant terms, such as “deferred revenue” or “growth margin.” Unlike other visualization tools available today, Birst does not require users to understand the underlying raw data structure in order to access the right information. With intelligent search capabilities, Birst Visualizer ensures that the user can easily zero in on the right data when creating a visualization.
Smart Recommendations: After the user has selected the data, Birst Visualizer recommends the best chart to visually represent the information. As the user pulls in more data, Visualizer provides further guidance on how to best visualize the information.
Cloud-Based and Mobile Optimized: Birst Visualizer is run entirely in the cloud, meaning users can access the tool anywhere. It is also HTML5 based, allowing users to explore data on their laptops, tablets and other mobile devices.
Dashboard Integration: Charts created through Visualizer can be integrated with Birst’s robust dashboard capabilities, empowering users to turn their visualizations into ongoing metrics that can be shared with the rest of the organization.
Drag-and-Drop Interface: Once users select the measurements and attributes they want to view, Birst Visualizer’s intuitive interface allows them to simply drag and drop the data into different visual dimensions to display the information in various forms.
Report Expressions: Birst Visualizer provides an expression editor for creating Report Expressions that can be used for visualizing custom calculated columns. The look-ahead (intellisense) and auto-completion capabilities of the expression editor allow users to easily create expressions and then leverage them to create powerful, flexible visualizations that provide deeper insights. For example, a user can quickly and easily create an expression that takes the sales and cost data and derives a profit percentage metric that can then be visualized.
End-First Approach: The guided mode of the Birst Visualizer lets users create visualizations with the end visualization in mind. The user starts by selecting the desired chart and the Visualizer guides the user through the process of selecting the appropriate data to build out the selected visualization.
Build.com, the leading web-based home improvement retailer, used Birst Visualizer during early availability to gain greater customer insight through data harvested from the company’s various business applications. By giving employees from different departments access to an easy-to-use visualization tool, Build.com was able to uncover new opportunities, increase efficiencies, and raise employee productivity.
“Birst Visualizer empowers employees across the Build.com organization – from sales managers to product teams to marketing execs – to share actionable insights based on data visualizations,” said Russell Lobban, Director of Customer Analytics at Build.com. “This evolution from report designer to Visualizer is just what our typical business users—not data analysts— need to actually see the data take shape in intuitive ways that they understand, allowing them to dig deeper and ultimately make better decisions.”
About Birst
Birst is the only enterprise-caliber Business Intelligence platform born in the cloud. Less costly and more agile than Legacy BI and more powerful than Data Discovery, Birst is engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to give meaning to data—all types and sizes. Coupled with the agility of the Cloud, Birst gives business teams the ability to solve real problems. Fast. Find out why Gartner named Birst a Challenger in its most recent BI Magic Quadrant and why thousands of businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs. Learn to think fast at www.birst.com and join the conversation @birstbi.
