Business Intelligence: Birst Partner Program Meets SaaS

Yes, even business intelligence partner programs are connecting with the cloud. One prime example: Birst, an upstart in the BI market, says 27 systems integrators have joined the company’s SaaS-centric partner program. Here’s the scoop.

Never heard of Birst? We weren’t very familiar with the company. Then we spent some time checking out their management team — which includes seasoned veterans who previously worked at Hyperion, Oracle, SAP and Siebel Systems — among other data management-centric software companies.

Instead of focusing on the traditional BI market, Birst targets SaaS opportunities. Birst claims  the SaaS-centric BI market will grow three times faster than the overall BI market, due to all the usual bonuses of leveraging a cloud solution: lower TCO, less time to deploy, and easier to scale.

For their partners, Birst provides a customized training roadmap, best-practices sales and marketing tutorials, and implementation and support processes. The company points to the usual “recurring revenue” benefits when describing SaaS to partners. But we’ve got to spend a bit more time investigating how Birst’s SaaS approach differs from other SaaS options on the market.

And yes, plenty of BI companies are getting into SaaS. In addition to the usual closed-source options, open source upstarts like Jaspersoft and Pentaho (two members of The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50) have been gaining some SaaS partner momentum.

It’s true that many resellers haven’t quite figured out how to cash in on SaaS yet, but the market’s still showing explosive growth as VARs, MSPs, and enterprises alike figure out how efficient cloud deployments can be.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.