Birst Appoints New Leaders to Drive European Market Expansion

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 10, 2015) - Birst, the global leader in Cloud BI and Analytics, today announced a significant expansion of its business operations in Europe with the appointment of key leadership personnel in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland. The four appointments provide support for customers and partners across 11 countries.

Birst appointed the following cloud and BI experts:

• Mathias Ritter as Managing Director of Central Europe - Ritter will be charged with leading market development for Cloud BI in the DACH region for Birst. He joins Birst from QlikTech and has a long history in the business intelligence and analytics markets. Previously, Ritter worked with Progress Software, Business Objects and Crystal Decisions.
• Rabah Krouchy as EMEA Director of Alliances and Channels - Krouchy will lead EMEA channel development, as well as business development in France. He previously held senior leadership roles at Qlik, MicroFocus, Sybase, Computer Associates and Merant. He also mentored early-stage startups in expanding their sales initiatives across all international markets.
• Dirk Verweij as Managing Director of Benelux - Verweij will grow the Birst business in the Benelux region, focusing on supporting customer and partner development. Verweij brings more than a decade of industry experience to this role, having led market development, enterprise software sales and management in the region for Information Builders and Cognos.
• Matti Karell as Managing Director of the Nordics - Karell's 25 years of experience across business intelligence and cloud technologies is nothing short of impressive. Having held roles with SAP, SuccessFactors and IBM Cognos, Karell is a welcome addition to the Birst Nordics team.

"As the growth of business intelligence and analytics continues to thrive at a global level, so has the demand for our ability to meet the needs of this growing customer and partner landscape," said Jay Larson, CEO at Birst. "We are leading the charge for cloud BI and analytics, and the addition of each of these impressive executives is testament to that. European companies want to compete, differentiate and win at a global level. Having the ability to combine user-generated data with centralized enterprise data stores, while extending data governance and control throughout their organizations, affords them the opportunity to do exactly that. Birst delivers something nobody else can -- the ability to take full advantage of your unified data to make better decisions that will separate the winners from everyone else. I am looking forward to this expanded European team, as they are primed to support our existing -- and future -- customers and partners."

Birst provides a cloud business intelligence platform that combines a centralized enterprise data management layer with support for user data analytics and visualization. Birst helps organizations unify their data and bring users into working with analytics to answer their own questions, rather than relying on central reporting to push data out, or users working with their own individual data sets and point tools.

"There is a huge wave of interest across the whole of Europe around analytics from both the technical side and from the business perspective," said David Gray, Vice President of EMEA for Birst. "It's important to look at how businesses can make better use of analytics for decision-making across the organization, rather than in isolated silos. Birst enables an organization to quickly assemble an operational view of its enterprise data and align, navigate, and ready this data for user consumption. The addition of each of these talented professionals speaks volumes regarding the value each can bring to not only our organization, but to the global customers and partner organizations with which they will be working."

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About Birst
Birst is the global leader in Cloud BI and Analytics. The company helps organizations make thousands of decisions better, every day, for every person. Birst's patented 2-tier Data Technology and comprehensive BI platform sits on top of all of your data, to unify, refine and embed data consistently into every individual decision -- up and down the org chart. Thousands of the most demanding businesses trust Birst Cloud BI to make metric-driven business execution a reality. Learn more at www.birst.com and join the conversation @BirstBI.