"If in 1999 you would have said, ‘let’s put our company data in the cloud’, everyone would have looked at you sideways. But these days, everybody does it," says Southard Jones, VP Product Strategy at Birst.
"So [Brad Peters and Paul Staelin, founders of Birst] took the concept of the cloud and all the great things in Business Intelligence (BI) and decided to pour them into one."
Birst think they stand out from other providers by offering a comprehensive end to end solution, automating the process of analysing raw data and building all functionalities into the cloud.
Jones says: "Every time we add a new feature, which is every two weeks, everybody gets it. You never realise you’re being updated but you’re always getting new features and capabilities. And you don’t have to pay for it. There is no down time, you just get it. It’s always on, always running. The people who value this are true end business users, not just analysts and Brad and Paul’s belief was that is where the power of BI was."
He spoke to CBR about the importance of BI, how it can be used to further business opportunities and how Birst can help along the way:
How can BI create new business opportunities?
I’ve been living in the SaaS world for a long time and [I know] it can be very difficult to understand what your contribution to the overall business is and whether you’re supposed to be leading product from the foothold or an upsell product. Giving this type of insight to knowledge workers or business [through BI] users gives them the ability to get a line and an insight on what they are trying to do as a business and which regions are they trying to land and expand.
Is the role of cloud making it easier to roll out BI?
Absolutely. We’ll get live in a third to a fifth of the time it would have taken a traditional BI solution to get up and running. Also, BI analytics is inherently iterative: you don’t know what the second question you’re going to ask is until you’ve got the answer to the fist question.
So what cloud automation does is it gets is up really quickly, like I talked about with the template, in four weeks or less. So when the user has a question you can get back to him in hours, you’ve got that agility and automation which are the corner pins of the cloud.
Are enterprises becoming less nervous about hosting sensitive data in cloud?
I guess the question is now not if people will move to cloud, but when and how quickly the lead majority will come on board with the innovators and early adopters who have already moved there. So the tipping point has passed.
The broader question is regionally, as well as industry wide, where is the cloud moving faster? Since the Snowden Incident with the NSA, I think what you see is companies like us that are an American company with data centres in the US, there are a number of folks internationally who are bit skeptical about putting their data in an American data centre.
Has Birst seen reluctance from customers to host data on US servers?
We’ve seen a little bit from international companies in Europe or Asia Pacific who are a little reluctant to put their data in a US cloud because of Snowden, NSA and the patriot act.
I wouldn’t say that it’s blocking the sales cycles because we can deploy it in another area. But it’s ironic that is the reason they’re hesitating, not because they are concerned about cloud but they’re concerned about the government.
We host within a server in Ireland for a number of our European customers and we do the same thing in Singapore. The majority of our customers are off our servers in the US though.
