Partnership Targets BI Scalability

When it comes to high performance enterprise analytics, the key phrase of the coming year is going to be “ease of use.” With an endless parade of new offerings and possibilities, including the addition of new frameworks like Hadoop, many companies are pitching offerings designed with simplicity in mind.

This week ParAccel and Birst announced a partnership aimed at bringing ease of use to advanced business intelligence and analytics users by matching the performance focus of ParAccel’s database offering with the slick visualization and cloudy capabilities of Birst.

In addition to leveraging ParAccel for performance, Birst said it will be using ParAccel’s analytical platform to increase the scalability of its business intelligence offering. This is all part of a fair trade according to the companies. On the other end, ParAccel will be integrating Birst’s software within its own business.

ParAccel delivers an analytics platform to a number of large companies, including Office Max, Nielsen IAG, and Fidelity National Information Systems, among others. The company says its massively parallel, columnar approach with built-in algorithms and in-database analytics are defining points that separate them from competitors, including EMC Greenplum, Teradata, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza, and others in the growing analytics market.

According to Chuck Berger, CEO at ParAccel, “Whether companies elect to deploy their BI and analytics solutions in the cloud or on premise, the technology must deliver unsurpassed performance and scalability, especially when dealing with larger and more complex data sets.” He continued, noting that this partnership will let BI users leveraging their platform and Birst’s software “to make sense of their big data and empower business users to analyze a multitude of complex data types faster than ever before.”

On the flip side, in the increasingly competitive business intelligence market, Birst’s advantage is that it can be deployed in-house or in the cloud, which for some companies, offers more flexibility in terms of infrastructure and resource allocation. Customers include, among many others, Altair, Citrix, Motorola Solutions and Rackspace Hosting.

Brad Peters, CEO at Birst says that his company has “revolutionized traditional BI by delivering a much easier to deploy and use solution that can be run in the private or public cloud, yet still retain the enterprise capabilities one would expect from traditional big BI.” He says that the addition of ParAccel’s platform to back their offering, his company can extend “these capabilities to the realm of big data, giving customers a way to unlock insights from ever-growing volumes of data.”

In a recent interview, Peters said that part of what sets his company apart in the noisy BI space isn’t just the cloud delivery capabilities, it’s the fact that offering software as a service means a better experience overall. This is because the service is “less bloated than legacy software products while still delivering what’s needed to perform BI.

Related Stories

GPUs Push Envelope on BI Performance

Old Dogs Learn New BI Tricks

Quest Software Tops IDC Charts for Database Tools