Spend Analysis Tool From BIQ Brings Unprecedented Power to Individual Users

BIQ, a provider of innovative spend analysis tools, today announced the availability of the next major release of its spend analysis software. The product, also called BIQ, enables business analysts to access, explore and manipulate large datasets, from a variety of sources, without IT assistance.

BIQ is significantly different from conventional spend analysis tools in three important ways. It gives users the power to create their own datasets quickly and easily, to explore large datasets without being encumbered by rigid hierarchies and data structures, and to analyze an enterprise-size dataset on an ordinary laptop computer with a few clicks of the mouse.

Eric Strovink, CEO, commented on the tool's advantages, "BIQ users can learn more about their data in a few hours than they normally could in weeks or even months. It's a tool that encourages experimentation, which in turn leads to important insights about buying and spending behavior."

BIQ allows point-and-click creation of data dimensions and measures, along with real-time construction and deconstruction of data hierarchies. This eliminates the time, expense, and technical resources needed to make changes using conventional data warehouse tools. Analysts can quickly identify who is buying what, how much is going to which vendors, how one group's spending compares with others, and how spending and demand compare to previous periods or to other benchmarks.

Businesses previously won over by the innovative features of BIQ will receive further benefits from the new version 3.1, including:

--  Dramatically improved Data Loader performance, making it even easier
    to manipulate huge transaction datasets and to perform one-off analyses.
    BIQ users routinely create data cubes, for example, to analyze IT spending
    or cell phone usage or off-contract buying, and discard them when the
    analysis is done; now this process is even faster.

--  The already-rich ad hoc reporting facility includes treemaps, graphs,
    crosstabs, and Excel model population. Version 3.1 is further enhanced with
    automatic pivot table refresh and new data extraction options.
    

Procurement analysis firms leverage BIQ for their clients as well. Tariq Hassan, CEO of The Buying Triangle, commented on TBT's use of BIQ, "The Buying Triangle is dedicated to advancing best practice procurement-to-pay solutions. BIQ gives us an important competitive advantage because it enables us to spend much more time identifying savings opportunities and constructing process improvements for our clients, and much less time organizing and re-organizing their data."

Strovink added, "Too many spend analysis initiatives stop once the low-hanging fruit is harvested. With real ad hoc analysis and dozens of commodity-specific data cubes, BIQ helps extend savings indefinitely. This new release pushes our analyst customers further along the continuum of independence, low cost of ownership, and complete flexibility."

BIQ is powerful enough to be used alone, yet cost-effective enough to be used in concert with other enterprise tools. The product can be deployed on a laptop, a desktop computer, or a server, in any number of configurations. BIQ is available on a month-to-month basis, without prepayment or cancellation penalties.

About BIQ

BIQ's mission is to provide innovative, enterprise level data analysis tools for the business analyst at a reasonable price. BIQ users are from both large and small enterprises within the financial, services, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors. For more information about BIQ, visit www.busiq.com.