SAP and Birst collaborate to offer cloud-based analytics on Hana

Engineering partnership promises high-speed analytics from a single cloud platform

Enterprise software giant SAP and cloud analytics firm Birst have announced a collaboration that will see Birst's analytics solution integrated with the the SAP Hana Cloud Platform.

Birst has offered Hana connectivity to its users since April, but this announcement marks a formal two-way "engineering partnership" with SAP. Birst customers will now be able to subscribe to the end-to-end SaaS offering with Hana embedded in Birst, while SAP cloud customers will be able to use Birst for analytics.

Both firms were keen to explain what a good a fit the deal represents.

"Our goal was to create the best cloud analytics platform out there," Brad Peters, Birst chairman and chief product officer, told Computing, explaining that his company's raison d'être is organising data in various formats and from multiple sources so that it can be cross-matched and analysed quickly to provide insight.

"We beat the heck out of databases because we're doing a lot of pre-manipulation of data to get it ready for end users who want to be able to ask what they perceive to be simple questions," he said.

"We've been looking at every database under the sun for about 8 years - and broken many of them - in our quest to find the ultimate user-tier database. We want data in a user-ready format so we can ingest it into our analytics engine quickly and agilely and get it out to any end user that wants it, and Hana is the leading-edge platform to do this.

"The speed, agility and underlying infrastructure are going to allow you to do some pretty amazing things," Peters added.

For SAP, Birst represents another piece in the jigsaw of its still-emerging cloud strategy.

"There are two main themes in our move to cloud," said Prakash Darji, senior vice-president and general manager of platform-as-a-service at SAP.

"One is our SaaS applications we got through acquisitions, such as SuccessFactors, Ariba and Concur. The second is our Business Suite enterprise cloud. Hana offers integration to all of these services, and we've got extensibility in our APIs that allow for the integrating and extending of these applications.

"One such extension we see as useful is Birst giving agile analytics on top of that platform, not just for SAP sources but non-SAP sources and on-premise sources too," Darji said.

"Our goal has been to make sure we have a single SaaS offering that allows for mass simplification, which is what we've been targeting for Hana all along. We want to make simple things simple and complex things simple too."