Continuing its campaign to democratize business intelligence (BI), Birst Inc. is adding features that enable users to carry on conversations while using its networked BI platform and also giving them limited extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities. The company also ported its mobile app to the Android platform.

Birst’s novel B I approach maintains a central data repository while enabling users to manipulate replicated copies in their own sandboxes. They can combine data from different sources and share models with each other for embellishment, all without altering the central data store.

The new ETL features address most common data import issues, such as converting pivot tables to row-and-column format. “We’re not unrolling hierarchies yet. That’s a little too complex,” said Southard Jones, vice president of product strategy, adding “That’s coming down the pike eventually.”

Collaboration features enable users to carry on conversations about the data as they are working within a shared view, using a comment stream metaphor that is familiar to users of social networks. Birst has introduced new snapshotting features to support this capability. This enables a user, for example, to navigate back to an earlier discussion get a view of the data as it existed at that time. “That can be useful if someone has made a comment about something that’s changed or is no longer there,” Jones said.

The Android client has been brought up to parity with the previously existing iOS version of the software. The client displays the same dashboards that the user has defined on the desktop. In addition, users can take data offline for local analysis by setting up scripts that automatically update the mobile device. Birst doesn’t currently support two-way replication, although Jones noted that capability is in the long-term roadmap.

Birst has raised $156 million in three funding rounds since 2012, including a giant $65 million infusion last March. Business continues to double every year, Jones said, asserting that the company is successfully targeting refugees from Oracle’s BI platform. The new features will be included in Birst’s standard on-premise and cloud software license fees. Birst doesn’t publish pricing information, but the software lists for $1,445 and up on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.