Business Intelligence Leader Information Builders Showcases New Release of WebFOCUS
Includes More Than 100 Updates Driving the Expanding Scope of BI
NASHVILLE, TN (June 09, 2009) –
Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced new products and updates to its WebFOCUS portfolio, including more than 100 functionality enhancements focused on driving the expanding role of BI at leading enterprise and government organizations worldwide.
According to the 2009 Gartner Executive Programs CIO Survey, BI remains a top-five technology priority for the fourth year in a row. Yet many organizations are still struggling to get BI into the hands of the people who need it. BI technology helps organizations drive value from IT investments in tangible ways like making business processes more efficient and information-management processes less complicated.
As the scope of business intelligence expands beyond dashboards, OLAP, and report distribution, Information Builders is continually adding new components to WebFOCUS that bolster essential BI capabilities without the need to buy add-on products. By adhering to standards and leveraging open source software, Information Builders has incorporated search, predictive analytics, electronic publishing, performance management, and mobile BI, to give customers BI applications that are pervasive, inexpensive, and easy to deploy.
“Information Builders has led the market in bringing BI to more people by delivering rich functionality on a budget,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “We have added new features that actively help customers push BI to support more applications, touch more facets of their business, and deliver BI to 100 percent of the people that need it. These add-on components alleviate the need for customers to buy separate BI products, not only reducing license costs, but also making the entire BI environment easier to learn, upgrade, and maintain.”
Key highlights include enhancements that help organizations understand what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen through BI.
Active PDF and InfoAssist: Insight on What Has Happened
Part of the latest version of WebFOCUS, Active PDF extends the platform’s current Active Technologies capability to give users the ability to quickly and easily navigate and filter large documents and complex analytical dashboards. Rather than scouring hundreds of printed pages, users are able to consume and print only the most relevant business information from anywhere, on any smart device, saving time and money.
End users who currently leverage Active Reports and WebFOCUS Enable for Adobe® FLEX® can now access custom interactive and animated analytic dashboards in PDF format for free. This new interactivity builds on the coordinated, print-ready PDF capabilities that WebFOCUS already provides. In addition to dashboards, Active PDF can be used for bank and investment statements, inventory reports, invoices, and more.
Introduced in November 2008, InfoAssist is an intuitive ad hoc reporting solution that provides business users with the easy-to-use, robust query and analysis tool they need to make faster business and operational decisions. Information Builders has added more than a dozen enhancements to make report building even easier, including:
* Compose View combines the features of query building with the ability to style and present customized documents, and allows users to build multiple reports and charts on the same canvas
* New Cube Browsing capabilities allow users to browse any cube or database in the InfoAssist Interactive Design view and see a live preview of the query output as they add and remove objects and formatting in the Layout Canvas
* Configuration of global preferences and default values for things, such as record limits or choosing to remove functionality
WebFOCUS Activity Monitor and Magnify Search: Visibility Into What Is Happening
WebFOCUS Activity Monitor provides visibility into automated business processes by integrating business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence. This BI/BAM solution captures end-to-end transaction and workflow data across multiple applications and business units, summarizing and displaying trading partner metrics to help managers make informed decisions. Using a multitude of iWay adapters, WebFOCUS Activity Monitor can now channel real-time events, like cash register transactions, directly to an in-memory database. There they connect to display and analysis facilities as well as to the Information Builders performance management console for real-time KPI comparison with prior data.
Enabling users to query, report, analyze, deliver, and display electronic trading data in any way they choose, WebFOCUS Activity Monitor delivers dashboards with embedded BI capabilities to help administrators quickly troubleshoot problems, detect anomalies, and conduct capacity planning exercises. WebFOCUS Activity Monitor can alert individuals to changes and exceptions that may require action, as well as provide aggregated insight for strategic planning.
WebFOCUS Magnify(TM) the industry’s first search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities has been updated with new features designed to enhance both usability and security. Highlights include:
* Collections, enabling users to select a collection that narrows their search to a specific part of the index, prior to their submission
* Magnify iWay Wizard, helping users to quickly set up a Magnify environment, instructing them how to handle each field when transforming a record into a search result
* New security features including single sign-on integration, multiple credential support, the ability to hide entire results and parts of results, and present alternate-result rendering as well as a security API
WebFOCUS RStat: Predicting What Will Happen
WebFOCUS RStat is the first BI platform to enable data miners, statisticians, BI developers, and analysts to collaboratively build predictive applications for field and operational employees. Now shipping with WebFOCUS, RStat extends the value and accessibility of predictive analytics in production BI applications across the enterprise. RStat now offers even more predictive models and robust statistical sampling routines, including random and stratified sampling with user-defined strata. Its easy and intuitive user interface also includes a built-in calculator for sample sizes. RStat allows data miners and BI developers to work collaboratively with the same tools to access, manipulate, or transform data; develop predictive models; and create and deploy Web applications to any worker within their organization.
All new product features and functionality are being showcased at Information Builders Annual Summit User Conference, held this week in Nashville, TN. For more information, visit www.informationbuilders.com/summit.
About Information Builders
Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners.
Source: Information Builders