SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 25, 2014) - Birst Inc. today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a Challenger in the 2014 "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" reportⁱ. 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 27 different BI and analytics software vendors, Gartner analysts placed Birst in the Challengers Quadrant based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

In the report, Gartner highlighted the growing appeal of cloud-based BI solutions, noting that a greater number of businesses plan to run their BI in the cloud this year.

"As the demand for BI continues to grow across different industries and within organizations, Birst's cloud-based platform provides a robust yet agile solution that brings the power of analytics to everyday business users," said Birst CEO and co-founder Brad Peters. "We are proud to be recognized as a "Challenger" by Gartner, and while cloud-based BI continues to gain momentum, we are thrilled with our position in such a rapidly evolving market."

Birst's enterprise-ready BI platform brings disparate data together and combines it with powerful analytics, enabling users to make smarter decisions based on actionable intelligence. Over the past year, Birst has strengthened its leadership status in cloud-based BI by unveiling multiple industry-leading products, services and initiatives, including:

• Birst Visualizer: Birst delivered a new business-oriented visual discovery capability in its complete end-to-end cloud platform. Combining Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations, this new analytics tool reduces time-to-answer for business users.
• Recurring Revenue Solution Accelerator: To give subscription-based businesses the ability to maximize revenue, accelerate growth and reduce churn, Birst launched its new Recurring Revenue Solution Accelerator, which delivers critical insight into key product and revenue performance and trending customer data, based on industry best practices.
• Operational Analytics Solution Accelerator for NetSuite: Birst's new solution accelerator integrates into NetSuite's enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SuiteCommerce applications to provide advanced analytic capabilities that are unavailable through standard reporting and analysis.
• Support for Amazon Redshift: Birst unveiled its integration with Amazon Redshift to enable developers or businesses that require the full features and capabilities of a relational data warehouse on large data sets to take advantage of Birst's proprietary data transformation technologies.
• International Expansion: Birst grew its global presence through partnerships with numerous overseas vendors and opened new offices in Europe and the Middle East.

To access the Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report, visit birst.com/gartner.

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 only enterprise-caliber Business Intelligence platform born in the cloud. Less costly and more agile than Legacy BI and more powerful than Data Discovery, Birst is engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to give meaning to data -- all types and sizes. Coupled with the agility of the Cloud, Birst gives business teams the ability to solve real problems. Fast. Find out why more than a thousand businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs. Learn to think fast at www.birst.comand join the conversation @birstbi.

ⁱ Gartner, Inc., "2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms" by Rita L. Sallam, Joao Tapadinhas, Josh Parenteau, Daniel Yuen, Bill Hostmann, February 20, 2014