San Francisco, CA, November 15, 2012 – Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced a business intelligence (BI) replacement program, “Birst4BOBJ,” for SAP customers currently using BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports who are currently faced with a major upgrade to SAP’s new BI Suite 4.0. The new program gives these customers the opportunity to switch from their current SAP solution to Birst’s award-winning business analytics platform. Birst’s modern Cloud-based approach delivers BI that spans heterogeneous applications at a fraction of the cost and complexity of SAP BusinessObjects. To prove this and for a limited time only, Birst will provide like-for-like functionality to current SAP BusinessObjects customers at 50 percent of their current BusinessObjects maintenance costs.* Birst offers enterprise-class capabilities, including integrated ETL, data warehouse, and advanced data visualisation in a cost effective way with a faster time-to-value and at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

“If there was ever an example why legacy, on-premise BI is a dying model, the forklift upgrade being forced upon customers to move to BusinessObjects BI Suite 4.0 is it,” said Birst CEO and Co-founder Brad Peters. “Birst provides a singular solution with all of the necessary features, built-in scalability and upgradeability versus an archaic collection of point solutions that are integrated only on their price list.”

Satisfaction levels of SAP BusinessObjects customers are at an all-time low, as evidenced by a leading analyst firm’s annual market overview assessment of the BI marketplace, which ranked SAP as the lowest of any vendor in the survey for overall customer experience—which includes ratings for support and software quality and for sales experience—for the fifth year in a row.

“As consumers review their big stack BI investments, the complexity and cost of upgrading to new versions can often outweigh the advantages of the new software,” said Shawn Rogers, Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates. “This event creates an opportunity for companies to reevaluate and introduce newer, more agile solutions to their BI Ecosystem, often with significant cost savings.”

For many SAP BusinessObjects customers, there is no direct upgrade path to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Suite 4.0 and customers will be forced to re-create their business intelligence application. Customers will be required to allocate resources and budget to maintain a complex and expensive to manage and maintain solution. Birst offers much of the same functionality, and in many cases, more than SAP BusinessObjects, but at a fraction of the total cost of ownership and with the benefits of faster time to value and the peace of mind that comes with excellent customer service and friendly support staff from a company whose sole focus is business analytics.

To learn more about Birst, its enterprise-class capabilities, and how SAP BusinessObjects customers can cut their current maintenance costs in half, join Birst and Enterprise Management Associates analyst Shawn Rogers for a webinar on December 6, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. PT.  Register at www.birst.com/birst4BOBJwebinar. 

* Minimum support thresholds and other important restrictions apply.  To learn more about these restrictions and the Birst4BOBJ program, please visit www.birst.com/birst4BOBJ. 

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.

Media Contact:
Mark Kember
mark.kember@goode.co.uk
+44 1491 873 323

Further Information

Goode International
Candi Hindocha
Account Executive
Tel: 01491 873323
Email: candi.hindocha@goode.co.uk