SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/11/13 -- Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Challengers quadrant of the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.* The report presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to use business intelligence (BI) platforms. After evaluating 38 different BI and analytics software vendors on 15 functional areas, Gartner analysts placed Birst in the Challengers quadrant based primarily on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

With regard to the business intelligence market, Gartner states that "although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand." The report adds that, "descriptive analytics have largely been completed for most large companies in traditional subject areas, such as finance and sales, but there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments. Moreover, many midsize enterprises have yet to even start their BI and analytic initiatives. Gartner's view is that the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets."

"The demand for BI is indeed growing, and the inclusion of Cloud BI vendors in this year's Magic Quadrant demonstrates that Cloud is increasingly in demand and going mainstream as well," said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst. "More importantly, we believe Birst's recognition as a Challenger is not about our cloud expertise, but due to our ability to deliver business benefit to our customers through product depth, strength and ease of use that addresses their business analytics needs."

Recognized for its ability to provide significant value to organizations, Birst's enterprise-ready BI platform makes data analytic ready and combines it with powerful analytics, enabling users to make smarter decisions based on actionable intelligence. In the last year, Birst has further strengthened its leadership status in Cloud-based BI by unveiling multiple industry-leading products and services, including:

• Big Data Services: Birst delivered the industry's first end-to-end solution to turn large volumes of unstructured data into analytic applications, providing a turnkey analytics infrastructure that eliminates the investment required for Big Data adoption;
• Managed Data Mashups: Birst's ground-breaking model for creating a managed environment for business users to create data mashups allows businesses to analyze data regardless of data location and without the need to move or replicate data;
• Birst Discovery Edition: A simple-to-use, quick-to-deploy version of Birst that empowers business users to intuitively explore data and build reports in minutes from local or centralized data without the need for data modeling, providing discovery capabilities and a stepping stone to more production data management capabilities;
• Predictive Sales Analytics: An updated version of Birst for Sales Analytics offers new capabilities that deliver deep predictive analytics into sales performance and the flexibility to combine sales force automation (SFA) data with other data sources;
• Support for Hadoop, NOSQL, and Big Data analytics data sources: Birst equips the business analyst with the power to discover new relationships and patterns in data and allows them to integrate these sources with other enterprise sources easily.
  
  

Gartner's Magic Quadrant evaluates BI and analytics vendors on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute. Overall, Gartner Magic Quadrants are a culmination of research in a specific market, giving a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market's competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, Gartner Magic Quadrants quickly help IT professionals digest how well technology providers are executing against their stated vision.

To access the Gartner 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report, visit birst.com/gartner.

Learn more about Birst and try it at no cost. Register for Birst Express at birst.com/express.

*Gartner "2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" by Kurt Schlegel, Rita L. Sallam, Daniel Yuen, Joao Tapadinhas, February 5, 2013.

About the Magic Quadrant
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Birst
Birst™ is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of your organization's business analytics and the agility to answer questions spanning departments, data sources, and deployments -- across both public and private clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to answer their most pressing business questions, and the ones they didn't know to ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information, visit www.birst.com or follow us on Twitter @BirstBI.

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