Birst 7 brings analytics to the enterprise

Mark Bannerman, Managing Director at EOH Infor Services, Infor’s Master Partner in Africa, operating as a Gold Partner

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Birst, an Infor company and a leader in cloud business intelligence (BI) and analytics for the enterprise, recently announced Birst 7, a major new software release that brings centralised and decentralised analytics to the enterprise, in a single platform. The new release empowers enterprises to deliver trusted, governed insights, across the organisation, balancing freedom and control, through a modern, consumer-grade user interface designed for scalability and speed.

“Birst 7 provides an entirely new data modelling experience that extends Birst’s patented data warehouse automation technology and a completely re-imagined administration module for managing centralised and decentralised deployments, including new auditing features and more granular user management capabilities,” confirms Mark Bannerman, Managing Director at EOH Infor Services, Infor’s Master Partner in Africa, operating as a Gold Partner.

“This enables enterprise organisations to democratise data modelling while still maintaining centralised compliance and governance. Key capabilities include enterprise data modelling and self-service data preparation in a unified, easy-to-use interface, enterprise administration with advanced data orchestration, and Birst Smart Analytics.”

Birst Smart Analytics is a new set of AI-enabled capabilities that elevate organisations above traditional reports and dashboards, using machine learning algorithms to power intelligent insights not previously available to business users.

The Birst 7 software release is generally available (GA) now, as both a cloud-based offering and as an on-premises virtual appliance. The virtual appliance offers the exact same rich capabilities, upgrade path and level of support as the enterprise cloud version, so enterprises can move from one deployment model to another to meet their strategic and operational goals.

“With 14 different ERP and reporting instances distributed globally, one consistent definition of revenue was challenging to calculate, especially when using different currency rates,” said Marcus Williams, Business Intelligence Developer at Carlisle Fluid Technologies, a global company that manufactures equipment for the supply and application of paints, coatings and sprayed materials. “We have been successfully using Birst over the last three years to move users to a central BI system across regions, while also giving our business units the freedom and agility to do their own analysis to better track information across finance, sales and supply chain.

“We can now maintain a single version of revenue and continually build out trusted KPIs, based on Birst’s unique Value Based Design methodology,” Williams said. “We are excited about Birst 7 because our growing deployment will greatly benefit from productivity gains using a new, modern interface to onboard new developers and manage more complex workflows for data integration and loading, as well as granular user/role management and auditing.”

Organisations are currently challenged to manage governed enterprise analytics from a centralised administration team, while still empowering local, self-service customisation from a globally distributed, decentralised analytics team.

Birst 7 enables organisations to create enterprise-wide, trusted key performance indicators (KPIs) and complex enterprise data models, and, at the same time, it allows decentralised teams to extend analytics with their own data in a way that is easy to use, scalable and repeatable. In addition, control of centrally managed data assets can be shared with decentralised teams, without the need to replicate or duplicate data, ensuring continuity and trust.

“We’re focused on making everyone, from enterprise administrators to data modellers to business users, more productive and on driving actionable analytics out to the edge of the enterprise,” said Bhargav Addala, Birst Vice-President of Product Management. “We’re empowering global organisations to deliver trusted, governed metrics to decentralised analytics teams, which can extend and enrich the ‘shared version of the truth’ semantic layer, using self-service data preparation built specifically for the needs of the business. All of this is delivered through a unified, easy-to-use, modern interface providing every analytics consumer and creator the tools they need to tackle any analytics use case.”