Last week Infor, a provider of cloud-based business applications, announced an agreement to acquire Birst, a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) platform. The agreement follows a string of acquisitions and buyouts during the past several years that signal a growing consolidation in the BI industry. (See “The Current BI Consolidation is different Than the Early 2000s“) 

Infor plans to make Birst a horizontal service within its CloudSuite portfolio of business applications as well as continue to sell Birst as a standalone BI tool. Birst will continue to run as a subsidiary with its own branding and team.  

Infor views Birst as a strategic acquisition to become a network ERP company. “There’s a market and demand for consistent analytics across all environments,” said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor. “We want to be the new enterprise analytic standard.” 

Repeating History. Infor is duplicating the strategy that Oracle took when it acquired Siebel Systems in 2006 along with its Siebel Analytics suite of BI tools. Oracle used Siebel Analytics technology to build out a portfolio of analytic capabilities to complement each of its business applications. 

This move comes as no surprise, as Brad Peters, who led the Siebel Analytics product line, is now the chief product officer at Birst, and Charles Phillips, before becoming CEO at Infor, served as co-president and director of Oracle. Infor and Birst spokespeople talked enthusiastically about how Infor was doing what Oracle did ten years ago, only bigger and better, and in the cloud.

Replaces Cognos. Currently, Infor OEMs BI tools from Cognos and OpenText. Infor will replace those tools and existing reports with Birst. However, Infor will continue to support the old tools and reports. No Infor customers will be forced to make the switch. But all future versions of CloudSuite applications will come with Birst and Birst-enabled reports. 

According to Duncan Angove, president of Infor, with Birst, customers will have “one platform that can do both operational reporting as well as analytics, visual discovery, and dashboarding.” This will motiavate Infor customers  to standardize on Birst across their enterprises to reduce their BI footprints, he said.

Benefits for Birst and Customers

For its part, Birst gets a huge worldwide sales and presales team plus an installed base of 65 million CloudSuite subscribers who are prime candidates for using the tool. They also get the backing of Infor to continue enhancing and selling Birst as a stand-alone platform. 

Birst customers will be relieved to know that Birst will continue to sell the product outside of Infor for the foreseeable future. In fact, with Infor’s backing, it’s likely that Birst will be able to accelerate its product roadmap, although much near-term development will likely be devoted to integrating the toolset into CloudSuite. 

Birst is eager “to be part of a like-minded company that has a similar culture and focus on modern cloud architecture, network business models, and design central to strategy,” said Brad Peters, chairman, founder, and chief product officer at Birst. “We want to make this product as wildly successful as possible, and this gives us the opportunity to punch into the marketplace and make our impact.”