Birst Extends Consumer-Grade User Experience with ROLAP and ETL for Business Users

NEW YORK, Nov. 7, 2017 — Birst, an Infor company and a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics for the Enterprise, today announced its Fall 2017 software release that will extend its consumer-grade user experience with the most comprehensive set of options for preparing and analyzing data using a Cloud Analytics solution, as well as enhanced networking and greater interactivity.

With the new release, Birst continues to empower business people with capabilities traditionally reserved for power users.

“We continue to add next-generation capabilities to our modern, consumer-grade user interface that put great power in the hands of business people in a more elegant, user-friendly and intuitive way,” said Brad Peters, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Birst. “These capabilities, previously only available to sophisticated enterprise customers, are now available to anyone and Birst is the only cloud analytics provider to deliver them.”

These new capabilities will provide business users with extensive, enterprise-caliber Connectivity, Data Transformation, Networking, Interactivity, and Administration.

Connectivity

Birst’s Fall 2017 software release extends its Connected Data Preparation experience to business users with best-of-breed ROLAP (Relational Online Analytical Processing) capabilities so that they can extract data from databases or query it directly from other sources using Birst Live Access. This empowers any business user with instant analytics on top of databases without having to move their data to the cloud. ROLAP is a form of online analytical processing (OLAP) that performs dynamic multidimensional analysis of data stored in a relational database.

Birst was the first cloud analytics provider to introduce the ability to query data in place with its Live Access capability released in 2010. In contrast to other cloud analytics vendors that only support simple query pass-through, Birst delivers full dynamic SQL generation on tables in the underlying database. Now, with the Fall 2017 release, business users will have access to this capability without provisioning by an administrator.

Data Transformation

Birst’s Fall 2017 software release also makes the platform’s best-of-breed ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) capabilities available to business users.  Business users can now leverage new drag-and-drop transformations, leverage R scripts, append – or “union” – data, as well as write their own custom ETL scripts. With these new features, business people can leverage R’s powerful and sophisticated machine learning capabilities and create advanced data prep routines to support the most complex transformation requirements

Networking

With powerful, enhanced networking capabilities, business users can take data prepared in Birst and readily share both the data and the metadata describing that data with others. By doing so, business users help others easily combine the shared data with their own data, enabling broader and more consistent analyses and, in turn, making the entire organization smarter and more aligned.

By enabling this capability more broadly, this release helps business users more quickly turn data from disparate systems into a shared analytical network that enables organizations to better align both centralized and edge teams to drive better and more consistent decisions.  As a result, Birst Networked Analytics eliminates analytical and data silos, while enabling everyday business users to easily access and work with trusted data.

Interactivity

Birst is rolling out enhanced and expanded interactivity capabilities, as it continues to invest in the platform’s dashboarding and visual data discovery experiences.

New features include visual highlighting, a new method for interacting with charts on dashboards and visualizations, which moves beyond what visual filtering offered in the past. With visual highlighting, business users can select a data point or multiple data points, and any related data points in other dashlets will highlight. This enables business people to focus on selected data values without losing the surrounding context.

Birst’s expanded interactivity features also introduce multiple drill paths. Multiple drill paths give business users the ability to simultaneously drill on a visualization by more than one attribute, providing a richer understanding of the data being analyzed.

In addition, business users now can freeze column and row headers when working with cross-tab chart types – and can easily “collapse all” or “expand all” report sections, by category, at once. This delivers a spreadsheet-like experience for users who need to work with large tables of data.

Administration

Birst’s Fall 2017 software release also incorporates much-anticipated capabilities that begin to bring Birst’s administration interface to the platform’s modern, consumer-grade user experience. The first set of capabilities delivered includes a user management and security configuration.

Birst Free Trial

To experience how easy it is use Birst and to connect to a new level of trusted insights, sign up for a free trial. With the Birst free trial, business users can access data with pre-set, smart analytic connectors, prepare data with instant feedback in a consumer-grade UX, relate data accurately with smart suggestions, visualize analytics, discover new insights and more.