Birst Closes $38 Million For Cloud Business Intelligence update from August 2013

Birst nets $38 million for fueling growth, Capgemeni launches Elastic Analytics on Amazon's cloud, and SAP and the NFL team up to power cloud-based player comparison tools.

Birst Closes $38 million funding round.  Cloud Business Intelligence provider Birst announced it has completed a $38 million investment led by Sequoia Capital. All other existing investors participated in the round and were joined by new investors including Northgate Capital. The new funding will be used to further expand internationally, grow sales and marketing and invest in new product capabilities. The company continues to grow its partner and technology alliances and hopes to expand into new markets in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. “The demand for BI continues to grow and the shift to the Cloud has become unstoppable,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-founder of Birst. “We already have the industry leading product. This investment furthers our ability to strengthen our solution and will allow us to offer it around the world.” “Companies are drowning in data, and Birst is the lifeline that allows them to surface the information that really matters,” said Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia Capital. “We’re excited to continue to partner in their success.”

Capgemini launches Elastic Analytics.  Capgemeni announced Elastic Analytics, a new end-to-end Business Intelligence (BI) and big data analytics solution. Available via Amazon Web Services, the new enterprise-ready, integrated solution includes the infrastructure, management, security, support, and maintenance to run analytics solutions on a cloud environment. Elastic Analytics provides clients with an easily adaptable mix of technologies, sources and solutions that can be enabled for them, in a fraction of the time and cost of building a traditional Business Intelligence or Big Data solution. It uses existing ETL technologies and the AWS Hadoop-based solution, Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), to extract and merge the data into highly optimized analytics engines. “Organizations are struggling with the deluge of data and the ability to rapidly respond to new demand for insight from their business users.  Cloud offers a way to deliver solutions quickly but BI and big data infrastructure is complex to set up,”explains Lanny Cohen, Global Chief Technology Officer at Capgemini. “Capgemini partners with the leading cloud providers globally, and most recently has worked closely with AWS to create ‘Elastic Analytics’, a new end-to-end Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics solution available via AWS, to directly address this need.”

SAP's cloud-based analytics for NFL.com. SAP and the National Football League (NFL) launched an enhanced fantasy football analytics platform that offers users real-time insights to help users make more informed, winning decisions.  The player comparison tool is free at nfl.com/fantasy, and will give fans a tool to forecast NFL player statistics for games during the regular season, guide them to make important game-day decisions by factoring in statistical performance and intangibles such as weather, injuries, game location, player rest and more. “Integrating the software solutions and data storage expertise of SAP’s team with the knowledge and experience of the NFL Digital Media team has produced an extremely valuable fantasy football tool,” said Cory Mummery, senior director of Product for NFL Digital Media. “The player comparison tool, combined with our existing fantasy editorial content, social tools and player projections, provides users with an abundant suite of products to help them manage their fantasy teams.”