Solution Provider Sirius To Acquire Business Intelligence Firm Brightlight Consulting

Sirius Computer Solutions will bolster its big data and business analytics capabilities by acquiring business intelligence firm Brightlight Consulting, it said Friday.

The deal will allow Sirius, No. 28 on the CRN SP500 with $1.3 billion in annual revenue, to significantly expand and become a market leader with its fast-growing business analytics solutions and services practice.

Specifically, the post-acquisition Sirius should be able to deepen the level of service it provides to clients, better helping them handle immense amounts of data with the Hadoop Distributed File System and offering them deeper skills in areas such as predictive, realtime, social and mobile analytics.

[Related: XChange 2014: Succeeding In Cloud Requires Major Sales Transformation]

San Antonio-based Sirius and Brightlight, Redmond, Wash., have worked together on a number of projects over the past three years, said Rick Bailer, Sirius' senior vice president of sales, in a statement.

Once the acquisition closes, Brightlight will be immediately integrated into Sirius' software consulting services team, but retain the Brightlight name for its business analytics offerings.

For Brightlight, which was founded in 2005, becoming part of Sirius will allow the firm to broaden the number of clients it can help, extend more robust consulting capabilities to existing clients and scale to better service enterprises both large and small, Mark Kettering, Brightlight's president and CEO, said in a statement.

"Our organic growth model could not keep pace with our opportunities," Kettering said.

Brightlight's managed service and cloud capabilities also will enable Sirius to offer clients either on-premises or cloud analytics solutions.

Sirius had already been making a big play into the cloud prior to the acquisition, deriving $400 million of its annual recurring revenue from cloud and maintenance business.

The solution provider has added cloud sales specialists to help traditional on-premises data center infrastructure sales reps transfer to a recurring revenue model, Michael Harwood, Sirius' senior vice president of marketing, said during the XChange 2014 Conference in August.

Brightlight's areas of specialization include data warehousing, data transformation, analytics and cloud, particularly in the health-care, retail and digital-media verticals.

For instance, an advanced analytics system installed by Brightlight at Seattle Children's Hospital in 2013 reduced nightly processing tasks from eight hours to two, and complicated analytical queries from all night to 10 minutes, according to CRN archives.

The company has worked with both platform vendors such as Oracle, Teradata and Microsoft, as well as technology vendors like MicroStrategy, Tableau and Information Builders.

Brightlight has its deepest competency with IBM's Netezza data-warehouse appliances and has developed its own data-integration framework software, and deployment and systems management offerings around the Netezza system.

PUBLISHED OCT. 27, 2014