From Humble Beginnings – 2012 Launch Of Birst

When it comes to IT, timing is everything, which is why on the eve of an expected announcement from Salesforce.com about its analytics cloud, Germany-based SAP SE has  launched a pre-emptive strike.

SAP said on Friday it’s teaming up with a startup called Birst Inc. to extend its reach in the business intelligence market. The partnership means SAP’s customers will be able to layer Birst atop whatever they’re doing to better analyze their data, while Birst users will be able to rely on cloud-based SAP HANA database management tools. Birst had added this capability earlier in the year, but the partnership means it’ll be able to reach SAP’s more than 258,000 customers.

Birst is ‘bursting’ with more than $60 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, among other investors. It faces tough competition from companies like Tableau Software – which has plenty of cash resources of its own – but the access to SAP HANA is an important differentiation point.

“A lot of our customers are also SAP customers,” said Birst Chairman Brad Peters to Diginomica. “We’ve been looking to partner with them around HANA for some time.” Birst is an agile analytics platform that does most of its work in the database and take data from a bunch of different places.”

SAP will be able to offer the functions of a hot little enterprise startup to its own customers, hopefully preventing them from straying to competitor firms. More importantly though, enterprises now have a reason to try out the cloud version of HANA, which SAP pitches as the engine to analyze data from its other products using Birst.

SAP’s move can be interpreted as a response to rival Salesforce.com, which is set to unveil its new cloud and analytics strategy at Dreamforce this week. It comes just days after SAP CEO Bill McDermott boasted to Reuters that the company “has never been stronger.”

However, his comments are contradicted by a recent report from German-language site Borse Online, which claims SAP’s upcoming fourth quarter results are set to be much lower than expected. It references an internal memo from Luka Muic, SAP’s chief financial officer asking for the company to make savings and put a freeze on recruitment.

Nevertheless, McDermott doesn’t seem to be bothered. “We are investing, we are hiring, we have lots of things that we are doing to grow our company,” he told Reuters.