OREANDA-NEWS. February 06, 2015.  Birst, the global leader in Cloud BI and Analytics, today announced that England's Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has chosen the Birst Cloud BI Platform and is in the first phase of implementation as part of a new project that will provide the Agency with interactive management information and business intelligence around its activities. The SFA, an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is responsible for the distribution of over ?4 billion for skills training for further education (FE) in England. Using Birst's Cloud BI platform, the agency's Performance and Management Information team will provide analysis and reporting on learners and training providers in the FE and skills sector to evaluate and demonstrate the value in spending on education services.

The project with the SFA is a strategic business intelligence (BI) implementation and the procurement was completed as part of the UK G-Cloud framework. Using G-Cloud, the SFA and Birst streamlined the procurement process and established the business case for investment in Cloud-based business intelligence. Following the successful completion of the procurement exercise, Phase One of the project has now been completed. This first phase included the implementation of Birst's Cloud BI platform at a secure Cloud hosting service, and the delivery of the first management dashboards for the SFA's internal staff to use.

Rich Williams, Deputy Director at the SFA, commented, "This project represents a great opportunity for the SFA to demonstrate that the money assigned to further education in England is being used successfully to improve the lives of those that participate. To this end, the project delivers greater management insight and agility around the use of data for decision-making. The project with Birst will extend in future to our FE provider partners as well, delivering more insight into how to make best use of the budgets that are available to them, in a safe and secure manner. The degree of insight we are getting as part of Phase One of the project has already helped us to see new opportunities for efficiency."

Birst Cloud BI can be deployed across public, private and hosted Cloud platforms. For SFA, Birst's Cloud BI platform is deployed as an appliance within a secure private Cloud. David Gray, Vice President EMEA for Birst, commented, "There is an absolute increase in demand for analytics and BI in the UK public sector. As organisations and departments across this sector aim to maximise efficiency savings and use budgets in the most efficient ways possible, solutions such as Birst simply make good sense. Leveraging Cloud BI helps these bodies integrate new and existing data sources so that information can be analysed, accessed and put to use by everyone throughout the organisation -- not just data analysts or BI specialists. Having the ability to provide data to everyone throughout organisations such as the Skills Funding Agency can have a fundamental and positive impact on how these bodies run their operations and can save massive amounts of time and -- perhaps more importantly -- ensures ultimate value."

Birst provides a Cloud BI platform that integrates an organisation's critical data sources together into one place. Using Birst, companies can unify and manage the enterprise data layer alongside the visualisation and dashboarding tools that make up the user layer. With this two-tier approach, Birst helps organisations put user-ready data and analytics tools into the hands of employees, partners and customers. This approach ensures that individuals can make better decisions around all their activities, increasing the value delivered across the organisation.