Birst Launches Mobile Business Intelligence SDK for iPad from the Cloud 
Business analytics provider Birst Inc. is offering a cloud-based Birst Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Apple iPad. The new iOS SDK lets devs quickly and easily embed Birst’s interactive and visual business analytics into apps for iPad mobile devices.
Business analytics provider Birst Inc. has launched a cloud-based Birst Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Apple iPad.
The new iOS SDK lets devs quickly and easily embed Birst’s interactive and visual business analytics into their own iPad app. Developers can also build robust mobile apps so users can quickly and easily filter pertinent information then drill into more detail on both charts and report tables, company officials said.
“The Apple iPad has become the tablet device of choice for mobile business applications,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-Founder of Birst, in a statement. “The Birst Mobile BI SDK gives ISVs the agility to provide rich analytics and dashboards into their native applications for the iPad quickly and easily.”
The iOS SDK sports custom features designed to allow devs to quickly build mobile BI applications that also leverage the iPad’s capabilities and interface, including
- Dashboard exploration via touch and gestures. Birst dashboards for the iPad leverage the tablet’s touch-screen interface. Users can intuitively swipe down to scroll through rows in a report table, swipe left and right to move from one report to the next. Easy to use prompts make filtering of results on a dashboard page a breeze. When drilling from one dashboard page to another, Birst automatically passes filters to the destination page.
- Secure access to any data, on premise or cloud. Birst BI solutions integrate data from a variety of on-premise and cloud-based sources so users have access to one version of the truth. And Birst BI’s cloud-based architecture provides a high level of mobile access control and data security.
- Automation of the analytical data store. Birst makes it possible to deploy apps in faster and more cost effectively than other business intelligence products.
Using the Birst Mobile SDK ISVs can concentrate on building business intelligence into their applications because they don’t need to deal with those plumbing layers. By writing to Birst Mobile APIs, developers can bypass complex data integration, quality, and consolidation issues behind BI implementations, according to company officials.
One BI analyst from Gartner said the latest SDK is a sign that mobile BI still needs IT to deliver agile plumbing and apps that can tap into growing data volumes.
Despite the excitement about a mobile BI device that organizations can actually use, Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer said organizations also need to invest most of their resources in “plumbing layers” of a BI stack. Components of this BI stack, Bitterer said, include components for data warehouse, data integration, data quality and a core BI engine.
