SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - July 20, 2010) - Birst, the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence, today announced the immediate availability of concurrent user pricing as an alternative to the standard "named user pricing."
Making world-class BI available to more users, at lower cost
Concurrent user pricing solves the challenge of delivering greater insight to a large number of potential users, without prohibitive expense.
With concurrent pricing, organizations acquire licenses for the desired number of users that can access the Birst solution at any one time. This means that a company only licenses the number of users active on the system, rather than the maximum number of named users who could potentially use the solution.
In contrast, traditional on-premise business intelligence (BI) software solutions operate solely on a "named user" basis. The software is licensed to a particular, identified user and installed on their computer. The customer pays whether that person is actually using the software or not. In this situation, larger customers often end up paying for "shelf-ware," software that is not actually used. This pricing model can limit the scale of traditional BI deployments, due to the high cost of extending analysis to more users and the risk of lower-than-anticipated adoption.
Concurrent user pricing is ideal for larger companies that would like to have the solution available to thousands or tens of thousands of users, but expect that only a smaller subset will be online with the solution at any given time. Instead of paying named-user license fees for employees who will use the solution infrequently, the customer pays for only the capacity they actually need. This allows companies to avoid paying for large amounts of software and hardware that are underutilized.
"Birst was already bringing the benefits of insight to companies that never thought that they would be able to afford a real, powerful business intelligence solution," said Scot MacGillivray, co-CEO of Cervello, a Birst partner. "This new concurrent user pricing will bring the Total Cost of Ownership even lower, while expanding the availability of critical reports and analysis to even more users. I think that our larger customers in particular will be very excited about this."
On-demand business intelligence: providing greater flexibility and value to the customer
Concurrent pricing shows how the on-demand, or cloud, model offers superior solutions to traditional business intelligence challenges. Now, large numbers of employees and knowledge workers can have access to information that previously was prohibitively expensive. This new pricing model leverages Birst's fully multi-tenant architecture which allows customers superior economic value by pooling resource use. This is just one of the ways in which Birst is reinventing the BI economic model in favor of the customer, in terms of price, ease of deployment, scalability, and usability.
"Birst was already revolutionizing business intelligence by providing a complete, affordable, and flexible BI solution that can deliver insight to anyone in the organization, from the CEO to the front line employee," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "Concurrent user pricing demonstrates yet again how Birst is dedicated to creating maximum value and impact for the customer."
For more information on concurrent user pricing, please contact sales@birst.com. To learn more about embedding Birst in your application, contact OEMsales@birst.com.
About Birst
Birst™ is the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions. Birst brings the benefits of fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is designed to support users of all sizes -- from individuals to groups and entire companies, so that everyone can benefit from greater insight into their business.
More information is available at www.birst.com
Contact Information:
For more information, contact:
Barbara Lewis
Birst
(415) 644-5400