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May 14, 2019

Birst 7 Brings Centralized and Decentralized Analytics to the Enterprise

NEW YORKMay 14, 2019  Birst, an Infor company and a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics for the Enterprise, today announced Birst 7, a major new software release that brings centralized and decentralized analytics to the enterprise, in a single platform. The new release empowers enterprises to deliver trusted, governed insights, across the organization, balancing freedom and control, through a modern, consumer-grade user interface designed for scalability and speed.

Birst 7 provides an entirely new data modeling experience that extends Birst’s patented data warehouse automation technology and a completely re-imagined administration module for managing centralized and decentralized deployments, including new auditing features and more granular user management capabilities. This enables enterprise organizations to democratize data modeling while still maintaining centralized compliance and governance. Key capabilities include enterprise data modeling 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 organizations 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-premise 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 fourteen 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.”

Larissa Baier, Senior Analyst for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at BARC, a leading enterprise software industry analyst and consulting firm, said, “A modern enterprise BI and analytics platform, such as the Birst networked analytics platform, is able to span traditional and explorative BI and analytics requirements both for standalone data and information applications, but also when embedded in operational applications. With the increasing importance of data to not only support management decisions but also increase the efficiency and effectiveness of operational processes – as well as the growing number of products, services and business models being based on data – a modern enterprise BI and Analytics platform is an indispensable backbone of any enterprise wanting to succeed in adapting to the digitalization of markets.”

Organizations are currently challenged to manage governed enterprise analytics from a centralized administration team, while still empowering local, self-service customization from a globally distributed, decentralized analytics team.

Birst 7 enables organizations to create enterprise-wide, trusted Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and complex enterprise data models, and, at the same time, it allows decentralized 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 decentralized teams, without the need to replicate or duplicate data, ensuring continuity and trust.

“We’re focused on making everyone from enterprise administrators, to data modelers, 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 organizations to deliver trusted, governed metrics to decentralized 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.”

Summary: Birst 7 Key Capabilities & Competitive Differentiators

  • Unified, easy-to-use, consumer grade interface for creating centralized (enterprise) tenants and decentralized (self-service data preparation) tenants with a single click – including the ability to copy tenants for centralized and decentralized teams.
  • New, enterprise experience for modeling large, complex schemas using Birst’s patented Automated Data Refinement (ADR) technology. This includes the ability to create and update ADR scripted sources, clone sources, and levels and grains, in a single user experience for centralized teams.
  • Fully cloud-managed Birst Connect 2.0 connectivity framework, with one-click migration for live access sources, including a new, easy-to-use interface for uploading complex flat files with advanced parsing capabilities and shared connections for centralized and decentralized teams.
  • Full application metadata and user-defined object localization in more than 40+ languages for a completely personalized user experience for decentralized teams.
  • New, unified interface for creating and managing complex variables and row-level security, at the individual tenant level, providing rich customization and personalization features for decentralized teams.
  • New enterprise administration capabilities for cloning complex data-orchestration workflows, transferring tenant ownership between centralized and decentralized teams, clearing tenant extraction and processing, and new, limited monitoring roles for decentralized teams.
  • Self-service data preparation automated transformations, with advanced pivot transforms, to seamlessly pivot data from rows into columns without any scripting or complex SQL for decentralized teams.
  • New Application Programming Interface (API) endpoints to generate formatted, print-ready outputs for dashboards and reports, including new export-to-PowerPoint capabilities for visualizer reports and entire dashboards.

About Birst, an Infor Company

Birst is an advanced networked business analytics platform. Organizations can achieve a new level of trusted insight and decision making by connecting their data and people via a network of analytics services. Birst scales from individuals to the enterprise in a manner that is smart, connected, and scalable. Learn more at www.birst.com.

About Infor

Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. With 17,300 employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress. To learn more, please visit www.infor.com.


Source: Infor

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