2 0 1 2 W H I T E PA P E R

Agile Business Analytics:

How a New Generation Business
Intelligence is Changing the
Market Landscape
 Table of Contents
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape...................3

Empowering the End-User...........................................................................................................................................4

Data Warehouse Automation ......................................................................................................................................5

Dynamic Semantic Layer – A Single Source of Truth......................................................................................................6

Flexible Deployments Options: An Effective Strategy for BI...........................................................................................7

High Performance and Scalability.................................................................................................................................8

Agile BI Delivers More Value.........................................................................................................................................9

Birst, Inc.

153 Kearny St., 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.birst.com | Email: info@birst.com | Toll Free Phone: (866) 940-1496

—2—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape

Agile Business Analytics: How a New

Generation Business Intelligence is
Changing the Market Landscape
Over 80% of organizations today have a Business Intelligence (BI) or reporting
implementation and are quickly realizing that legacy BI is not suited for today’s
competitive market. Traditional BI is ‘big’ in cost, go-to-market time and an
implementation normally takes several months and in some cases more than a
year; these projects do not meet the needs of dynamic environments and in most
cases are rarely successful. Data discovery tools are often explored as an alternative
to traditional BI and have a low time-to-market; however they do not deliver the
features, technology or scalability required for an enterprise-class BI solution.

Agile business analytics offers an alternative solution by enabling flexibility in

the technical, operational and economic aspects of BI. Enterprises ranked top
business priorities for the year as 1/increasing enterprise growth, 2/retaining new
customers, and 3/reducing costs—all things that an effective analytics strategy can
impact. When asked about top IT priorities for the year, Business Intelligence was
number 1; it is no wonder that Agile BI addresses every aspect of a BI installation
– from data access to report development and distribution, deployment flexibility
and user self-service. BI that is agile accelerates the development of solutions and
empowers organizations to derive maximum value from its BI infrastructure and
data sources. It delivers actionable content to business users and empowers them
to get answers to their questions in a self-service environment.

Implementing an effective analytics strategy has never been more important, yet it
remains a challenge as traditional BI tools struggle to meet the demands of today’s
dynamic environments due to heavy costs, long implementation cycles and lack of
flexibility. Additionally, data discovery tools fail to meet all of an organization’s BI
needs. This white paper explores the characteristics of an agile business analytics
infrastructure. It identifies key Birst capabilities that offer a fully-functional and
scalable environment, yet are flexible enough to meet the needs of changing
business requirements.

—3—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape
“With Birst’s functionality, we’re able
to protect our valuable data assets by
providing information to only authorized
users, sharing results without revealing
the data they’re based upon, limiting
access to competitive intelligence, and
maintaining the confidentiality of our
respondents. These capabilities are all
show-stoppers; we couldn’t have moved
forward without them.”
—Michael Curri,
President and CEO of
Strategic Networks Group
Empowering the End-User
Users have varying skill levels depending on their role. Executives, power users,
customers and partners are examples of consumers of information that resides
both inside and outside the firewall. User roles vary and are commonly dictated by
area of responsibility, job function and their place in the management hierarchy.
The first step in establishing a successful BI strategy is to facilitate collaboration
and acknowledge that every user has a different analytic skill set which changes
over time.
An agile environment successfully serves the needs of hundreds of users in the
organization and gives them accurate, actionable content in the format that they
prefer. It allows users to combine and massage data from different source systems
to get answers to their most pressing business concerns. And, when the users’
questions change, it adapts quickly to the new request.
Unlike ‘big BI’ and data discovery tools, Birst provides banded reporting, ad hoc
query, discovery and in-memory analysis from one suite. With Birst Designer, users
can create ad hoc queries, pivot tables via drag-and-drop and visualize data using
advanced chart types -- all enabled for drilling down to the supporting data. A
feature-rich WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with one-click
toolbars and drag-and-drop functionality reduces ongoing training costs. Both
IT-provisioned and user-created reports can be saved and shared for reuse across
the organization and are easily turned into interactive dashboards with only a
few clicks.
Power users perform advanced point-and-click analysis of the data. Every data
element in the analytical data store, including modeling results, plus all logical
measures can be made accessible for OLAP-style analysis and report generation.
Birst has a powerful logical query language for Excel-style calculations using
lookups and statistical functions as well as real-time alerts and conditional
formatting for exception reporting. Every report and dashboard can be exported
to PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV and scheduled and delivered via email throughout
the enterprise.
With other vendors, IT must cobble together a set of disparate products to
provide end-to-end functionality. In contrast, rarely are IT administrators required
to run Birst. Birst’s BI environment empowers users with tools to filter, sort, group
and do much more. Business users can build and share reports without depending
on IT. This ability fosters a community of self-sufficient users throughout the
organization.
—4—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape

Data Warehouse Automation

“One of our internal analysts has been An enterprise BI solution comprises a variety of real-time data sources including
spending three weeks a month running relational databases, enterprise applications, Cloud sources, Excel documents,
reports, importing information from our legacy systems and most recently, Big Data. Giving users access to the information
core insurance system into Excel and then they require, quickly and accurately, relies heavily on the underlying data
performing additional analysis. With Birst,
infrastructure. Data agility is the incremental addition of a new data source, easily,
we can automate this process, which will
without disrupting the existing metadata layer.
allow us to reallocate 120 hours a month
toward other aspects of our business,
Today’s BI solutions offer two forms of metadata:
and significantly accelerate key decisions
and their impact.”
1. In-memory associative data modeling which is not an actual database
—Vaughan Coots, 2. Manual data warehouse projects which add an ever-evolving scope, ETL
System & Application Manager, complexities and storage of non-real-time data.
Swann Insurance

In both cases traditionally, IT must custom-code scripts to integrate data from

multiple data sources. This means long implementation cycles and low adoption
rates.

Birst provides a high-degree of automation in a single product that addresses the

challenges of data access and integration. The advantage of automation is data
agility. It allows the rapid iterative development of an analytical data store and
easy addition of new tables, calculated tables and schema changes to an existing
data structure. With a few clicks, a Birst administrator can generate and maintain
fact and dimension tables and join relationships and the required processes for
loading into an analytical data store. In addition, Birst automates all database
management activities including index management, performance tuning and
optimization of disk I/O for performance.

Figure 1: Birst’s award-winning data layer automates the generation and maintenance of fact and
dimension tables, join relationships and ETL processes required for creating and maintaining an
analytical data store

—5—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape

Business users benefit from data integration from multiple data sources including
SAP (BW and R3), Salesforce.com, Hyperion Essbase, MS Analysis Services,
Hadoop, operational and financial systems into a modern star schema design for
advanced analytics and a holistic view of their business.

Dynamic Semantic Layer – A Single Source of Truth

Conventional BI requires IT to manually build and maintain a data warehouse
and write custom scripts to consolidate data from disparate operational and
transactional systems. The manual management of metadata requires expert data
architects and custom coding is done for every new data source added to the
data warehouse. Data discovery tools bring subsets of organizational data in-
memory and manually define associations between this data. IT must write scripts
to automate this process and it is repeated for every new data source added.

Birst Connectors provide data connectivity and extract options for on-premise
databases, flat and structured files as well as popular cloud applications. Birst
automatically accesses and combines disparate data sources into a modern star-
schema design with a few clicks and manages database management activities
including index management, performance tuning and optimization of disk I/O
for performance. This simplifies the process of adding new tables, calculated
tables and schema changes to the existing data structure.

Leveraging Birst’s leading data warehouse automation technology is an in-memory

database integrated completely into Birst’s end-to-end BI platform. The database
has a standard JDBC interface and integrates with any tool or infrastructure
that supports JDBC. It enables IT to deliver BI applications that adapt quickly to
changing requirements while business users can perform complex analysis such
as multi-pass queries and complex expressions on-the-fly. By optimizing data
structures for analytics and managing data in-memory, database operations
execute with maximum efficiency, achieving high gains in responsiveness. Birst’s
in-memory database is optional, and delivers performance which customers may
need, however it requires an additional hardware investment.

The advantage of automation is that it enables rapid iterative development of an

analytical data store by allowing IT to focus on the logical model underlying the
business process and not the physical instantiation of it. The underlying metadata
is dynamic and encourages re-use. Business users benefit from advanced analytics
and a single source of truth.

—6—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape

Flexible Deployments Options: An Effective Strategy for BI

Different organizations are in different stages of BI maturity with their own unique
requirements. Traditional BI locks companies into rigid on-premise installations
and high maintenance costs. These solutions take weeks to upgrade and often
require re-installation of software.

Agile BI favors movement from one deployment model to another with minimal
impact to the existing infrastructure. It addresses key strategic and operational
problems confronting the business and makes it easy to scale when adding
additional users, departments, and business units. Agile business analytics allows
organizations to port their installations into the cloud, on-premise or both, and
seamlessly expand existing server capacity to accommodate anywhere from
dozens to hundreds or even thousands of additional users. This implementation
approach makes sense on several levels and allows customers to “test drive” a BI
application and platform to determine the best possible configuration.

Birst provides organizations with a single solution with multiple ways to deploy
and deliver content. With Birst, organizations have unprecedented deployment
choices on how SaaS BI applications can be consumed by its users—in the Cloud,
on premise (or hybrid) or fully-functional, self-contained virtual appliance. Birst is
easy to setup, requires no configuration with upgrades in place. Organizations
have the flexibility to move a complete Birst solution from one deployment option
to another effortlessly from on-premise to the Cloud or vice versa.

• Birst Cloud is a multi-tenant, SaaS shared-server, fully-integrated and

delivered in the Cloud. Users get everything required for advanced business
intelligence in a subscription service delivered over the internet instead of
an on-premise software installation. Birst Cloud allows organizations to
remain agile with the benefits of SaaS over traditional, software-based, on-
premise installations: fast deployment, lower costs and rapid time-to-value.
• Birst Local is a hybrid approach that allows organizations to keep data on
premise while hosting the BI solution in the Cloud. Birst Local addresses
IT department concerns regarding data governance, cloud security and
analysis response times for large data sets. Without having to upload data
into the cloud, users can enjoy the benefits of SaaS and Birst’s advanced
analysis and reporting.
• Birst Appliance encapsulates the entire Birst BI suite as a virtual machine
for deployment on premise. It has a shared-nothing architecture, enabling
painless horizontal scalability and upgrades in place.

Birst Cloud, Birst Local and Birst Appliance are all options for deploying Birst
– it is the same powerful solution that can be delivered and consumed by an
organization in the way that it prefers.

—7—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape

Figure 2: Birst Cloud, Birst Local and Birst Appliance are the same powerful Birst solution deployed in
three seamless ways

High Performance and Scalability

As BI applications are successful and adopted, high performance and enterprise
scalability becomes crucial. For on-premise and Cloud solutions alike, an ideal
environment has minimal maintenance, is available 24x7 -- especially during high
load. Birst is built on high performance hardware that provides the necessary
reliability and availability that organizations need to scale over time. It is the
only end-to-end SaaS-based BI suite with fully integrated ETL, data warehouse
automation, enterprise reporting, ad hoc query and dashboarding to be delivered
in the cloud on high performance hardware.

Data scalability is the ability to access, massage and report on massive amounts of
data from operational systems such as SAP and Salesforce.com and big data stores
like Hadoop. Birst provides support for Hadoop and equips the business analyst
with the power to discover new relationships and patterns in data – unstructured
or structured – which is difficult to do with data modeling and discovery tools.
Birst’s agile environment gives business users the power to submit complex queries
for analyzing Hadoop data using HiveQL, and seamlessly combine Hadoop data
with other data sources such as SAP, Salesforce.com, operational and financial
systems. Users can then drill into reports for transactional detail.

Birst provides the rich feature-set customers expect from enterprise-class BI while
being affordable for the midsized organizations. Whether delivered in the Cloud
or on site, Birst is faster to deploy, more affordable and offers greater time-to-
value than traditional BI vendors while still providing the rich BI functionality for
which they are known.

—8—
Agile Business Analytics: How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape
Using Birst, Internap reduced the time its
employees spend on reporting activities
by 62% and estimates that the resulting
increase in employee productivity has
produced an ROI of approximately 145%
percent per month.
“Our investment in Birst has paid off
exactly as we anticipated. Birst ensures
that we’re all looking at the data through
the same lens so that we can more
easily reach consensus and make better,
faster decisions. We’re all on the same
page, with more time and an improved
understanding of how to do what’s best
for our business.”
—Nelson Santini,
Vice President of Sales
Operations at Internap
Birst, Inc.
153 Kearny St., 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108
www.birst.com
Email: info@birst.com
Toll Free Phone: (866) 940-1496
Agile BI Delivers More Value
Agile business analytics is changing the market landscape as more and more
organizations are realizing that the cost, resources and implementation times
of traditional BI does not lend itself to dynamically changing environments and
the discovery capability of discovery tools cannot meet the functional needs of
the organizations. With Agile BI, an initial phase can be deployed in a matter
of weeks, and subsequent features can be released iteratively. Agile BI solutions
guarantee data accuracy and automation, easy integration and aggregation,
support for multiple information consumption styles, flexible deployment options
and enterprise-wide scalability.
Birst delivers the industry’s first comprehensive business analytics suite available
in the Cloud or on premise, behind the corporate firewall. It provides the rich
feature-set customers expect from enterprise-class BI while being affordable for
the mid-sized organization. Whether delivered in the Cloud or on site, Birst is
faster to deploy, more affordable and offers greater time-to-value than traditional
BI mega-vendors and features the functionality missing from discovery tools while
providing the rich BI functionality for which they are known.
Figure 3: Often times, BI projects are iterative because as reports get deployed, user requirements
and additional reports evolve. With Agile BI, an initial deployment goes live in weeks and
subsequent features can be added iteratively.
About Birst
Birst™ is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of a
business’ analytics and agility to answer questions that span departments, data sources,
and deployments—across both public or private Clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to
answer their most pressing business questions—and then all the ones they didn’t know to
ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of
analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information,
visit www.birst.com.
—9—