SAP Partners with Birst Inc.
Tuesday November 4, 2014
SAP and Birst Partnership
SAP, the European software giant, announced on October 9, 2014 its intention to team up with Birst, a cloud service provider for businesses intelligence (BI.) The goal of this partnership is to provide customers instant computer data, stored in the cloud via SAP's HANA cloud platform. According to Brad Peters, chairman and chief product officer at Birst, "the real opportunity in BI lies in our ability to push data to the front lines, empowering every person to make every decision better."
About the SAP/Birst Merger
Germany-based SAP, which launched its first software product in 1973, is one of the largest software companies in the world. Its SAP HANA, released in 2010, gives businesses in-memory access to real-time analytics.
Birst Inc., founded in 2004, is a San Francisco-based cloud-based business intelligence company. Birst sells to both original equipment manufacturers and to companies, like Motorola and American Express, who use the Birst software analytics suite within their own software system.
What does the SAP/Birst partnership mean for current and potential customers?
The chief initial benefit of the SAP/Birst partnership to SAP customers is the ability to access analytics instantly from multiple locations, rather than having to wait for periodic updates and having the analytics dashboard limited to use on a single server. By storing this data in the cloud, companies can access information from anywhere an authorized person has an Internet-enabled device. In addition, multiple users can view the data at the same time and data doesn't require increased server space.
Birst cloud software allows SAP HANA users to customize their own data warehouse within the SAP HANA platform. This gives customers not only instant access to data, but instant access to exactly the data they use on a regular basis.
While the exact results of the SAP/Birst partnership remain to be seen, the coming together of these two computer leaders will likely yield exciting possibilities.