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Birst BI Solution Bursts On Marketplace Senior Contributing Editor Obtaining business intelligence (BI) is no longer for large enterprises, thanks to Birst, a new BI solution launched by Success Metrics that is aimed at small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and individual professionals.
Birst enables these firms and individuals to mine data for BI to accomplish a myriad of purposes including understanding needs of customers, responding to business opportunities, analyzing impacts of pricing and promotions, and budgeting and forecasting.
Birst is fully automated and hosted and handles any type of data, including finance, operations, marketing, customer service, and sales information. Its format is flexible. It accepts columnar data held in csv, Access databases, or Excel files. Birst is fast and easy to set up. Within a few minutes of signing up and uploading data, users can create their own reports and analysis. Birst can even automatically create some dashboard reports.
Individual users can get started immediately with Birst Free, a cost-free account that includes up to 10 megabytes of account size and can be shared with five additional users. Birst Basic and Birst Professional expand the available features, account size, and number of users, and cost $99 and $199 a month, respectively. Birst Groups and Birst Enterprise are also available.
Birst has proven itself in beta availability over the past few months. Graham Gunst, a professional at marketing software firm Nimblefish reports that he has been using Birst in conjunction with his Salesforce.com (News - Alert) SFA application.
“Birst allows me to easily analyze my client base, visually understand opportunity progressions through the pipeline, and quickly see where greater opportunities lie,” reports Gunst. “I have been impressed with how easy it is to set-up and refresh the data, and the depth of reports I am able to quickly generate.”
Jay Kong, senior manager, customer support at an unnamed Fortune 1000 computer hardware peripherals manufacturer said that Birst gives his firm a far greater understanding of his business and the decisions he and his colleagues can make to improve service levels and profitability.
“We have been using Birst for our RightNow Technologies (News - Alert) customer service data and have been amazed at how quickly and easily we can analyze the drivers of our business,” says Kong.
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Brendan B. Read is TMCnet�s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan�s articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Mae Kowalke |