Birst Unlocks Data Trapped in SAP Business Warehouse

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 7, 2011) - Birst, Inc., the leading provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) and analytics, today announced the immediate availability of Birst for SAP Business Warehouse (BW). Birst for SAP BW solves a common and persistent problem SAP BW customers encounter, namely the difficulty of accessing their data across InfoCubes for reporting and analytic purposes. Poor performance along with the lack of a user interface requires SAP BW customers buy expensive hardware-based accelerators and rely on Excel plug-ins or complicated connectors that are difficult to set up and configure. Birst solves these problems by helping businesses realize the full value of their SAP BW deployments and providing a complete, fully integrated BI suite without requiring any data movement.

"Birst is addressing an issue that has long been problematic for SAP shops -- doing real business intelligence in Business Warehouse," said Rob Hienekamp, CEO at Endowance Solutions. "With cloud caching capabilities that address the dreaded performance and scale concerns, Birst also lets organizations combine non-SAP data with their SAP BW data, without having to move it into or out of SAP."

Birst for SAP BW offers the following capabilities:

• Query performance boost via massive-scale, cloud-based caching -- Birst's sophisticated caching capabilities eliminate the need for a costly implementation of SAP BW Accelerator. By making optimal reuse of query result sets, Birst minimizes the load on SAP BW InfoCubes.
• Logical integration with any other data source -- Birst dramatically increases the utility of SAP BW InfoCubes by allowing customers to combine their existing cube data with other data from both on-premise and cloud-based sources.
• Self-service access for all types of users -- Through pixel-perfect, banded report writing, interactive dashboards, and ad hoc analysis, Birst empowers executives, analysts, and other business users with flexible access to business insights from SAP BW that enable fact-based decision-making.

"SAP BW was not designed with agile BI in mind and, as a result, is a cumbersome, slow, and difficult method of conducting even rudimentary data analysis," said Brad Peters, CEO and co-founder of Birst. "Organizations have considerable investments in BW data sets that are not just expensive to maintain, but have become isolated islands of data. Birst offers a single, logical view across BW, creating what essentially becomes an express highway that links disparate InfoCubes together and even allows for fast integration with non-SAP data sources."

Birst for SAP Business Warehouse is available now. Birst for SAP BW compliments existing Birst SAP integration, which provides direct access to R/3 data. To speak with a Birst expert, contact info@birst.com. For OEM and partnership information, contact partners@birst.com.

About Birst
Birst is the SaaS Business Intelligence leader. With its comprehensive Cloud BI Suite, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is the winner of the Red Herring Global 100, TDWI Best Practices, and Software Standard of Excellence Web awards. Birst customers include Citrix, RBC, Securian, Key Technology, and other leading organizations. For more information, visit www.birst.com.