Birst figures it's got the first SaaS-based BI software appliance.

The virtual appliance in Tuesday's release of Birst 5 is supposed to deliver enterprise-class BI capabilities to customers on their premises with the agility and economics of a Software-as-a-Service architecture.

The company says users can now choose how to consume its widgetry: in the Birst Cloud; in a hybrid Birst Local deployment that lets organizations keep their data on-premise while hosting the analytics in the cloud; or in a fully functional self-contained virtual appliance that encapsulates the entire Birst BI suite as a virtual machine in an on-premise deployment.

Thanks to its shared-nothing architecture, the appliance is supposed to overcome the challenges of traditional on-premise BI software solutions, enabling what the company calls "painless" horizontal scalability and upgrades in place.

Birst 5 also lets dashboard users and report developers schedule reports for delivery by e-mail. Power users can save, reuse and share sophisticated Excel-like calculations while performing ad hoc analysis and creating new reports. There's a new graphical user interface that's supposed to make logical data modeling a breeze. And OEM customers get broader and deeper integration capabilities via an enhanced Web Services API.

Birst is supposed to cost less than a third of traditional vendors and take a third of the resources to run. A basic deployment of the appliance should run $25,000 for 10 users. Birst is targeted at mid-size concerns with $50 million to a billion in revenue, folks for whom BusinessObjects, MicroStrategy or Oracle would be out of reach. The widgetry accepts any structured data such as files, databases, SAP or Salesforce.