Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com are expected to talk a lot about analytics next week at the CRM leader's annual Dreamforce conference. Just days before, rival SAP has looked to make a splash. SAP announced a partnership with late-stage startup Birst on Thursday that could help both with sales while continuing the alignment of cloud companies for a land grab in the business intelligence market.
The partnership allows Birst customers to use the cloud version of SAP HANA database management within the product, while customers of SAP's various offerings can layer Birst onto what they're doing to better analyze their data. Birst had integrated SAP capability back in June, but will reach a lot more companies embedded within SAP overall, which claims more than 258,000 customers today.
Each company gets a chance to crack a new customer base with the deal. As a venture-backed company with more than $60 million in funding from top investors like Sequoia Capital, Birst is in grow-fast mode, even bringing in a sales-focused outside CEO in April to lead the effort. Birst's also in a dogfight with other business intelligence companies like Tableau Software, which as a $5 billion (market cap) public company has plenty of its own resources. So while a Birst customer could already access their SAP data through Birst alongside data from whatever other services they used like Salesforce and Workday, the company can now pitch that new customers are getting effectively free HANA access.
SAP, meanwhile, gains the logo and functions of a buzzy enterprise startup to offer its own customers to keep them from straying to younger and smaller competition. Most importantly for SAP, it gives companies a reason to try and use the cloud version of HANA. Originally an on-premise solution, HANA's now being pitched as the engine you can use to scan your data coming from another product like SAP's human resources unit SuccessFactors through Birst.
In an interview, executives from both companies said the partnership is also an alignment betting on a particular type of analytics going forward.
"The line of thinking of visualizing data from a vertical, which I believe will be announced next week at Dreamforce, will go the way of the dinosaur," says Steve Lucas, president of platform solutions at SAP. "Even though SAP is an analytics company and Birst is, too, there's a common belief we share that there's a fundamental shift in the market to multi-data analytics."
Birst tries to position itself as a more robust data cruncher than Tableau, which has gotten so much traction at least in part because of its ability to quickly create eye-catching visualizations from a set of data. (And which Forbes used to that effect for this summer's World Cup.) To make that claim, Birst argues that it can pull in data from more places and in a more raw, unfiltered format. "We view the world as one where there needs to be user-ready data, and then there needs to be enterprise data, and the cloud is the place to create a tier for both," says Birst chairman and chief product officer Brad Peters, the cofounder who recently stepped down as CEO. Birst went on a "quest" to find the best data infrastructure company for the task, and settled on HANA, Peters says.
Both companies expect their competitors to continue to focus on more specific, "structured" approaches to processing and modeling their data. Some of that smacks of marketing. But SAP argues that increasingly, companies will expect to find answers from groups of data they didn't even realize could be related. "Now you don't have to put the data in a box, or put a burden on your IT," says Lucas.
And if the timing, right before Dreamforce, seems like a bit of a spotlight-grabber? Well, that's a tactic that Salesforce knows well itself.
