Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, 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 rich, simplified end-to-end BI suite in the cloud.

Birst received among the four highest scores in four of the five use cases assessed in the 2017 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report, which examined products from 26 vendors, published March 2. Birst scored highest for the OEM or Embedded BI (4.15 out of 5) and Extranet Deployment (4.18 out of 5) use cases. It received the third-highest score in the Agile Centralized BI Provisioning (3.80 out of 5) use case, and it received the fourth-highest score in the Governed Data Discovery (3.59 out of 5) use case.

“The founders of Birst have a deep BI 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 Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor. “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.”

Over the last six years Infor has built one of the largest cloud companies in the world with 65 million users in more than 100 countries. An investment of nearly $3 billion in research and development to re-engineer industry specific applications for the cloud has generated double digit growth in cloud subscriptions. With a critical mass of cloud subscribers and petabytes of mission critical data in the cloud, Birst provides Infor a single, elegant platform for to render insights, discovery, correlations, and predictive analytics in a highly consumable user interface.