Kalido wins BP deal

British Petroleum PLC’s (BP’s) Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) businesses are to begin using Kalido Ltd.’s Dynamic Information Warehouse (DIW) software to collect and analyze data from across the company, Kalido announced Monday.

Kalido specializes in consolidating information from different ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems using “reference data management.” This means that the software can cope with various systems’ reference data (if, for example, one database calls a product “ABC” and another knows it as “123”) and interpret it to form one view of the business.

This is BP’s second Kalido project, Kalido Founder and Chief Strategist Andy Hayler said Monday. The company is already involved in a project using Kalido software to pull together the information on disparate databases in its Lubricants divisions, and is now beginning a similar project in LPG, he said.

“BP has a range of different applications, a mix of SAP (AG), J.D. Edwards (& Co.) and some more obscure products, with 600 legacy systems. They have to monitor the business using that data and it’s all differently structured,” Hayler said.

The project covers a broad range of BP departments, including financial information, marketing and sales, supply logistics and human resources, Hayler said. He would not say how much the deal was worth, except to say that it was a “seven, maybe eight-figure deal.”

BP is not willing to talk comment on deal at the moment, Hayler said.

Kalido has also announced the establishment of a Boston headquarters. The U.S. represents about 40 percent of all software sales and “to be taken seriously in software you really have to be in the U.S.”, Hayler said. The company already sees a fifth to a quarter of its business coming from the U.S., he said.

The company will now have joint headquarters in London and Boston. “We’ve had a sales presence there for over a year, and we’ve established some reference customers. That’s important, because the U.S. can be quite parochial,” Hayler said.

Kalido’s software was originally developed by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group (Shell) during the 1990s, in an attempt to bring together all its information streams. The company was spun off in 2001.