SnapLogic, a cloud integration provider, has introduced an integration tool for Birst's cloud business intelligence suite. SnapLogic released the Birst Snap to its SnapStore. This connector enables businesses to integrate Birst's BI suite with other cloud-based and on-premise business applications for advanced analytics and fact-based decision-making.
The solution connects the Birst BI Suite with any finance, operations, marketing, social media, supply chain or other business application, helping to accelerate the adoption of advanced analytics, reporting and business intelligence. "Birst is already a complete BI suite delivering both the visualization capabilities such as dashboards, reports, and ad hoc queries as well the aggregation and optimization in data warehouse," Stefan Schmitz, vice president of products for Birst, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The Birst offering also supports data warehouse environments or appliances, Schmitz says. "We provide a direct connector for existing data warehouses and OLAP cubes, such as SAP Business Warehouse, Microsoft Analysis Services, and Hyperion Essbase," he explains. We call this capability Live Access and it lets you leverage on-premise data in existing data warehouses and cubes with data extracted from other sources using SnapLogic and then perform advanced analytics on the combined data sets." Examples of new data sources include social and Web data available via Twitter, Facebook, and Google Analytics.
The Birst offering through SnapLogic also is intended to speed return on business intelligence investments by eliminating the need for time-consuming, costly hand-coding to integrate critical sources of business data.
Birst Snap will also work with custom or "home-grown" applications that are generating BI data, Schmitz,says. "Home-grown applications usually sit on top of an RDBMS or provide options to export data to flat files. Using one of the existing Snaps for a RDBMS or delimited files, the Birst Snap can receive the data and load it.
SnapLogic's "Snaps" are reusable application-specific connectors that shield users from the complexity of integration, which can be joined together for any given data connections a business needs.
Information on Birst and SnapLogic are available at www.birst.com and www.snaplogic.com