Birst-ing into mainstream: Machine Learning meets Semantics in a networked world

Birst-ing into mainstream: Machine Learning meets Semantics in a networked world

Birst is one of the poster children of self-service analytics. Convergence and democratization are the key themes underlying Birst’s new release out today, as Birst is trying to balance self-service with enterprise requirements, and making a case for some of the industry’s defining trends while at it.

Today, Birst is announcing version 6 of its analytics platform. Birst, an analyst darling ranked as a leader by both Gartner and Forrester, has not had a new version in a while. We spoke with Pedro Arellano VP, Product Strategy for Birst, who offered some insights on the new features in this release: Machine Learning (ML) for the masses, data preparation and the Networked Analytics mantra.

While in and by themselves those features are not revolutionary, they are introduced in an effort to address real issues, and they mark the evolution of Birst into a platform with the ambition to chip away pieces of traditional enterprise IT analytics. Birst is trying to address 2 issues with this release: empowering business users and connecting data silos.

For Birst, ML is not really new: Birst was founded as an analytics platform for financial institutions before pivoting to a general purpose analytics platform, and ML was there in its initial incarnation to help address the need for predictions. As Arellano put it, the algorithms have been there all the time. These algorithms have been used under the hood already, but now they gain prominence in 2 use cases – data preparation and predictive analytics.

As any data scientist will tell you, preparing data for analytics is a real pain and takes up a lot of time. And if that is an issue for data scientists, it much more of an issue for business users using self-service tools like Birst to analyze their data. While platforms like Birst offer a wide array of connectors to ingest data from various sources, in the end the bottleneck is not so much in the pipelines for the ingestion process.

Read the full article on ZDNet


Join the Orchestrate all the Things Newsletter

Stories about how Technology, Data, AI and Media flow into each other shaping our lives.

Analysis, Essays, Interviews and News. Mid-to-long form, 1-3 times per month.


Write a Reply or Comment

Your email address will not be published.