Birst Business Intelligence Increases Value of Buyers Access Purchasing Program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 2, 2013) - Birst Inc., the leader in Cloud BI, today announced that Buyers Access, the leader in group purchasing for the multifamily housing industry, is deploying Birst's business intelligence (BI) platform to increase the value of its purchasing program for both its property management company clients and its suppliers.

With more than 650,000 units of purchasing power and a team of industry experts, Buyers Access has helped thousands of multifamily properties reduce costs and become more efficient. To do so, Buyers Access works with its network of suppliers to provide properties with optimal pricing and an economical purchasing process. Using Birst, Buyers Access will be able to identify properties that are not leveraging the program as planned. Additionally, Buyers Access will be able to notify suppliers in its network of opportunities to support property purchasing and increase sales. Birst will also provide Buyers Access with greater insight into client profitability, as well as the ability to create more accurate forecasts that will enable the organization to optimize its budgeting and planning processes.

"Moving from our current, SQL reporting environment to Birst is a game changer for our business," said Jeff Peterson, Director of Financial Reporting and Analysis, Buyers Access. "With Birst, we can design an entirely new report in two days instead of two weeks, two months, or even longer. We're empowering our business users to quickly make meaningful decisions that improve our business results -- as well as those of our clients and suppliers -- without the constant involvement of IT."

In a move to utilize technology instead of owning it, Buyers Access began a company-wide initiative to switch from on-premise applications to technology deployed in the Cloud. The organization implemented Salesforce.com to manage its sales and customer service activities, but continued to utilize its legacy, on-premise, SQL-based reporting tools when it discovered that its default data visualization and analytical capabilities were unable to meet the company's analytic needs. To fill the gap and complete its move to Cloud technology, Buyers Access evaluated a number of analytical solutions and selected Birst due to the overall flexibility and enterprise-caliber capabilities of its comprehensive, Cloud-based BI platform. With its pre-built data connector, Birst easily and seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com and is providing Buyers Access with single sign-on (SSO) to increase efficiency. Additionally, Birst's automated back-end, including data warehouse and ETL, will allow Buyers Access to quickly and easily combine and analyze data from additional sources in the future.

"As the only comprehensive BI platform born in the cloud, Birst enables organizations to lower their total cost of ownership and repurpose valuable IT resources without sacrificing analytical depth and breadth," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "Compared to simple data discovery tools and costly legacy BI, Birst is a powerful, economical alternative that supplies the insight organizations need to solve real business problems, fast."

To find out more information about Birst's solutions and how they can help your business succeed, visit www.birst.com.

About Birst
Birst is the only enterprise-caliber Business Intelligence platform born in the cloud. Less costly and more agile than Legacy BI and more powerful than Data Discovery, Birst is engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to give meaning to data -- all types and sizes. Coupled with the agility of the Cloud, Birst gives business teams the ability to solve real problems. Fast. Find out why Gartner named Birst a Challenger in its most recent BI Magic Quadrant and why more than a thousand businesses rely on Birst for their analytic needs. Learn to think fast at www.birst.com and join the conversation @birstbi.