Infor to Acquire Birst

Infor announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Birst, Inc., a pioneer of cloud-native, business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data visualization.  Birst is a unique, comprehensive platform for sourcing, refining, and presenting standardized data insights at scale to drive business decisions.

The Birst business intelligence platform connects the entire enterprise through a network of virtualized BI instances on-top of a shared common analytical fabric.  Birst spans ETL (extract, transform, and load), operational reports, dashboards, semantic understanding, visualization, smart discovery, and data blending to form a simplified end-to-end BI suite in the cloud. 

Enterprise data is complicated, federated, and inconsistent.  Birst has strong data aggregation capabilities including a networked semantic layer to standardize definitions across federated data sources.  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.

 BI companies provide the analytics platform but don’t understand industry processes and potential insights.  Application companies understand the processes and industries, but have lacked the platform to render data and analytics.  Infor and Birst represent the convergence of these worlds.  Large application companies end up acquiring BI products based on customer demand. Timing and fate allowed Infor to acquire a modern cloud BI platform as opposed to the legacy client sever BI products in use at legacy ERP companies.

San Francisco-based Birst has more than 300 customers worldwide and approximately 260 employees.

Terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Keywords: Cloud-Native, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Data Visualization, ARC Advisory Group.