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Infor, which makes industry-specific business applications built for the cloud, revealed June 1 that it has closed its acquisition of Birst, a pioneer of cloud-native, business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data visualization.
Birst is a sophisticated platform for sourcing, refining and presenting standardized data insights at scale to drive business decisions. Infor initially announced its intent to acquire Birst on April 25.
Terms of the agreement between the two privately held companies were not disclosed.
San Francisco-based Birst describes its BI software as delivering “accurate, actionable content in an intuitive, self-service environment.” It enables users to combine data from different source systems to get answers to business concerns in real time. When the questions change, the service adapts quickly to the new request.
Birst was built using open-source IT from Google, Facebook and other next-generation companies, CEO Jay Larson said, allowing it to scale while delivering high-level performance.
Birst customers include American Express, Aruba, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Jive, Kellogg’s, OpenText, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), and Samsung. The company competes with SAS, Oracle, Cognos, QlikView, BusinessObjects and Tableau, among others.
Infor, based in New York City, is the big Enterprise Resource Planning application company you may not have heard of, and it likes it that way.
Like Avis, the No. 2 car renter to Hertz in the “We Try Harder” era, Infor is happy to tell everyone that despite trailing SAP and Oracle in business software revenue by a wide margin, it is growing faster, its products are better and its customers are more satisfied.
Infor, whose specialty actually may be buying other software firms more than anything else, last year acquired Starmount, which delivers software and services for retailers to engage with customers. This follows two other acquisitions since May 2016, the ERP consulting firm Merit and retail demand forecasting software maker Predictix.
Another recent acquisition has resulted in the new Infor Commerce Cloud, a platform built around Infor’s CloudSuite applications and the global commerce and logistics network of GT Nexus, a 2015 acquisition. CEO Charles Phillips—a former Oracle president who took over at Infor in 2010—touted the Commerce Cloud’s ability to link buyers, sellers, financial institutions and logistic providers all in one place. “It is the Waze of global logistics,” he said.
Infor has about 16,000 employees and more than 90,000 customers in 170 countries, For more information, go here.