Birst Announces Concurrent User Pricing for BI Software

Mark J

Updated · Jul 21, 2010

Birst has just announced concurrent user pricing as an alternative to the standard ‘named user pricing.’ With concurrent pricing, organizations acquire licenses for number of users active on the system, rather than the maximum number of named users who could potentially use the solution. According to the
company in its news release, Birst claims that its concurrent user pricing is ideal for larger companies that would like to have the solution available to thousands or tens of thousands of users, but expect that only a smaller subset will be online with the solution at any given time.


“In contrast, traditional on-premise business intelligence (BI) software solutions operate solely on a ‘named user’ basis. The software is licensed to a particular, identified user and installed on their computer. The customer pays whether that person is actually using the software or not. In this situation, larger customers often end up paying for “shelf-ware,” software that is not actually used. This pricing model can limit the scale of traditional BI deployments, due to the high cost of extending analysis to more users and the risk of lower-than-anticipated adoption.

“Concurrent user pricing is ideal for larger companies that would like to have the solution available to thousands or tens of thousands of users, but expect that only a smaller subset will be online with the solution at any given time. Instead of paying named-user license fees for employees who will use the solution infrequently, the customer pays for only the capacity they actually need. This allows companies to avoid paying for large amounts of software and hardware that are underutilized.”

Read the Full News Release at Market Wire

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