The Chief Data Officer: An executive whose time has come
Data is becoming so important to understand and building a business that you need someone at the top to evaluate what data business should collect and how to make sense of it all.
Data is becoming so important to understand and building a business that you need someone at the top to evaluate what data business should collect and how to make sense of it all.
Business intelligence and analytics startup Birst has raised a $38 million Series E round led by Sequoia Capital. Birst has been very busy in the past couple years, moving from SaaS to on-prem software, rethinking the data warehouse and even launching a Hadoop-based service. It looks like Birst is positioned to test the IPO waters like Qliktech and Tableau before it.
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act.
Analytics startup Birst thinks it can make data warehouses more useful by letting business users inside of them. Its new Distributed Business Analytics product puts departmental sandboxes right inside the warehouse, letting users interact with all the data they need from a central location.
Birst, a San Francisco-based business intelligence company with its roots in the cloud, has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures. The new money comes as Birst tries to become a BI heavyweight by pushing its way into the software world, too.
In a meeting of analytics minds, Birst and ParAccel are putting Birst’s graphical reporting gloss atop ParAccel’s analytics database.
Deals like this are the latest proof that big data is important but the ability to put that data into a useable format is also key.
It may not be man-bites-dog but it is still surprising to hear about a software as a service vendor moving towards on-premises deployment. And yet that is just what Birst is doing, first with its business intelligence service and now with its home-grown in-memory database.
Birst is taking the cloud out of its SaaS BI offering with a new deployment option that lets customers run the product in their own data centers. The company says its virtual appliance delivers all the benefits of traditional cloud-hosted SaaS without, well, the cloud part.