Infor acquires Birst for cloud business intelligence and analytics

Infor puts 'war chest' to good use by buying Birst for undisclosed sum

Enterprise applications conglomerate Infor is to acquire cloud-based business intelligence company Birst for an undisclosed sum.

Birst describes itself is a cloud-native platform for sourcing, refining, and presenting standardised data insights at scale to drive business decisions.

It's BI technology spans extract, transform, and loading (ETL), operational reports, dashboards, semantic understanding, visualisation, smart discovery, and data blending - all in an end-to-end BI suite hosted in the cloud.

Customers include American Express Global Business Travel, Kellogg's, Reckitt Benckiser, Schneider Electric, and Citrix, and some 260 employees will be transferring to Infor.

The founders of the company have a long history in business intelligence, having been behind the BI of customer relationship management pioneer Siebel Systems, which was acquired by software giant Oracle in September 2005 for $5.85bn - considerably more than Infor will have paid for Birst.

For Infor, the acquisition comes just months after the company bagged $2bn in private equity investment from Koch Equity, which CO Charles Phillips pledged to pour into expansion.

"The founders of Birst have a deep business intelligence pedigree. 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 to the cloud," said Phillips.

He continued: "Now is the time to converge this cloud native BI platform with the world's first industry cloud company. We're going to define the next generation of analytical applications."

The company's statement added, acquired Birst for its "strong data aggregation capabilities including a networked semantic layer to standardize definitions across federated data sources."

It continued: "The company's Automated Data Refinement leverages intelligent unification technologies that can both map and model data from multiple different sources to define metrics once across all data repositories."

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