Infor Acquires Birst for Cloud Business Intelligence: What It Means

Infor has spent billions in recent years in the course of creating a next-generation cloud ERP suite, with most of the results coming from organic development. To shore up its hand in analytics, however, it is going outside with plans to acquire Birst, a fairly small but mature player in cloud-based BI (business intelligence). Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

In a statement, Infor CEO Charles Phillips provided the rationale for buying Birst:

"This is much of the same team that built Siebel Systems BI, which is now Oracle's BI stack. They put the band back together, pivoted to the cloud and built a modern BI platform with an understanding of future needs, experience with a wide variety of use cases, and commitment the cloud."

Meanwhile, Infor now has a "critical mass of cloud subscribers and petabytes of mission-critical data in the cloud," making Birst an ideal fit for deriving value from it, according to a statement.

It should be noted that Infor already has a BI offering, which includes an in-memory calculation engine, integration with Office and an application studio geared to the abilities of business users. Birst's feature set is more robust and the company has what Infor needs to meet customer demands. Infor and Birst also have complementary domain expertise:

Customers running multiple ERP systems have asked Infor to build the enterprise analytic layer across the reality of a federated environment. ERP application companies rarely have the expertise or interest to build this aggregation layer. BI companies provide the analytics platform but don't understand industry processes and potential insights.

"This is a natural move as enterprise applications customers move into the cloud," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. SAP and Oracle have had cloud BI offerings for a number of years, Birst gives Infor a mature, customer-ready cloud business intelligence platform, he adds. 

In turn, Infor's courtship represents a safe exit for Birst, which entered the cloud BI arena way before its time, Henschen notes. Infor's acquisition comes as the competition is getting formidable, with major vendors including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, SAP and IBM all pursuing cloud-based BI and analytic capabilities.

Meanwhile, "Tableau, Qlik and other heretofore on-premises-focused BI and analytics vendors have also been moving into the cloud, and it has all added up to increasing competition for Birst," Henschen says.