Birst into subscriptions

It is becoming increasingly common for businesses, both new and well-established, to consider subscription-based delivery of an ever-growing range of products or services, rather the selling of a licence to use. The potential of a long-term, annuity-based revenue stream can be very attractive, bit for many businesses it represents a dramatic and alien business model that seems to bring more heartache than it does benefit.

With this in mind, US-based cloud Business Intelligence (BI) specialist, Birst, has come up with some help, an implementation of its analytics tools specifically configured to give subscription-based businesses the ability to maximise revenue, accelerate growth and reduce churn by providing them with fast, accurate and meaningful BI and data analysis capabilities.

Known  as the Recurring Revenue Solution Accelerator, it gives businesses offering subscription-based products and services access to Birst’s SaaS-delivered BI platform to gain insight into key product and revenue performance data, as well as trends-oriented customer data, all based on industry best practices.

It automatically captures data from NetSuite, salesforce.com and other information silos within organisations, analysing it against pre-configured industry-standard KPIs to give businesses a clear view of current and historical performance, enabling them to proactively spot threats and opportunities with rich visualisations, customisable data dashboards and automated reports.

Subscription-based businesses face a much different measurement challenge than traditional product and service vendors. The Accelerator fills that void by automatically pulling in data from existing sources and producing key metrics like product sales, customer data, renewal status, contract value, acquisition cost, payback period and more. With pre-built analytics, dashboards and reports designed specifically for the subscription-based model, users can rapidly deploy a full-spectrum BI solution.

According to Brian Flood, Business Intelligence Analyst at OpenDNS, the Accelerator delivers quick, easy access to key metrics, fulfilling a market need that will continue to expand along with the prevalence of subscription-based products and services. “With the actionable intelligence provided by Birst, OpenDNS is able to make better, faster decisions that allow us to keep up with our rapidly growing business. This new offering further demonstrates Birst’s dedication to delivering meaningful answers to real business questions that significantly impact overall results,” he said.

The Accelerator can automatically extract live and historical data from NetSuite and salesforce.com, using pre-configured Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) scripts and star-schemas, and set them alongside built-in operational metrics and attributes in order to analyse and add contextual meaning to the data. A library of pre-built visualisations, dashboards and reports display the data and give users the ability to customise parameters, attributes and metrics to their specific business. 

“As a rapidly growing SaaS company, we well understand the key metrics that CEOs and CFOs require to measure the success of their organisations. The Recurring Revenue Solution Accelerator gives other SaaS companies that insight; they can simply turn on Birst, connect to cloud ERP and CRM applications and instantly get a dashboard with their organisation’s Magic Number, churn, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and bookings growth,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-founder of Birst.  “Birst’s unique cloud BI automation capabilities give our customers the ability to experience this value with unprecedented speed.” 

Birst’s solution provides rapid, enterprise-grade BI, including cross-platform correlation and analysis, plus rich data visualisations, giving companies of all sizes in every industry the critical insights they need to make business decisions based on up-to-the-minute data.