Tag: "Information Builders"

Information Builders Offers New Insurance Performance Foundation

Provides More Dynamic Single View Into Property and Casualty Business

NEW YORK, NY (September 09, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced an upgrade of its Insurance Performance Foundation (IPF), previously known as Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF). IPF provides performance management, collaboration, and role and dashboard management capabilities requested by many property and casualty CEOs. With new structured ad hoc reporting, the newly modularized IPF provides insurance companies such as the Mid-Continent Group with access to the full breadth of insurance business information, from summary to the lowest level of detail, required to give a single, accurate view of the business.

“Our CEO took a hands-on approach with IPF because it was key to helping him realize his vision to have a dashboard allowing him to drill down into finer details of results, confidently mine data looking at sub-classes of business and pockets of geographic locations to enable us to improve the results of our book,” said Gregg Jones, chief financial officer at Mid-Continent Group. “The IPF will enable us to provide a consistent, confident, single view to our business results that was previously missing.”

Insurance executives now receive pre-packaged dashboards showing performance against goals and can readily personalize content to identify concerns with a few clicks. Online collaboration on metrics and performance provides users with the ability to enhance company-wide information, including sharing of judgments, actions, and accountability for more informed decision-making across the business. Reports can be brought to the user based on a schedule or user thresholds, allowing executives to be proactive in looking at only the most relevant business information.

With a more engaging user interface, IPF’s new property and casualty reporting families are designed to empower even the most non-technical user to answer questions and perform real-time segmentation across underwriting, actuary, and claims areas with:

* Visual effects where drop-down lists in information requests better reflect the insurers’ business relationships and hierarchies
* Preferred defaults, so users see the best context for that information
* Enhanced search capabilities to provide easier filtering of large drop-down lists like agent, provider, or county
* Ability to recall previous requests and evolve in real time
* Off-line analytics capabilities, enabling brokers, and traveling staff to perform property and casualty analytics without connecting to the server

Heightened competition brought on by the challenging economy is driving insurers to save money now, while improving strategic use of information to reduce loss ratios over time. To accommodate this market trend, IPF is offered as four components that can be acquired one at a time or all together. As a modular solution IPF can complement existing insurance data warehouse efforts or deliver a complete data warehouse and BI solution. This flexibility differs from traditional insurance frameworks, because it means IPF can be implemented in months, not years. The four components of IPF include:

* Executive performance-oriented key performance indicators
* Management reporting frameworks
* Insurance data model (detail to summary full dimensional model)
* Prebuilt insurance data movement services (ETL) to load data model

“It’s our goal to help users be more self-sufficient to not only take the burden off IT and keep costs low, but also give each user the ability to be a more active and valuable contributor to the organization,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “Our deep property and casualty expertise continues to provide insurers with rapid options and powerful segmentation to lower expense ratios.”

IPF now supports workers compensation and surety insurers in addition to personal, commercial, and excess and surplus lines. The solution is available immediately with flexible pricing options, which range from as low as $250K for just the data model to $500K for the full package solution.
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. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets.

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

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Information Builders Named Business Intelligence Leader in 2009 CRM Market Leader Awards

Independent BI Leader Recognized for Innovative Products and Excellence in Customer Satisfaction

NEW YORK, NY (September 03, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that CRM magazine, the industry’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) publication, named the company a Market Leader in the Business Intelligence category for the 2009 CRM Market Leader Awards. Companies were recently recognized at the publication’s CRM Evolution 2009 conference.

With its eighth annual CRM Market Awards, CRM magazine honors the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies that focus on customer relationships and the customer experience through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies. In each of 10 categories, the magazine named one Market Winner, denoting the highest score compared to its peers. Each category also produced four Market Leader awards and “One to Watch.”

“To stay competitive in a challenging economy, companies must come up with innovative ways to improve their customer relationship efforts. This is exactly what the recipients of the 2009 CRM Market Awards have done,” said David Myron, CRM magazine’s editorial director. “We congratulate Information Builders as one of this year’s award recipients for their achievements over the last year. May their CRM efforts continue to succeed.”

“We are proud that for the past several years, Information Builders has been recognized by CRM magazineas a market leader in business intelligence,” said Gerald Cohen, Information Builders’ founder and CEO. “Customer satisfaction and building strong customer relationships are core components of our business. This award marks a significant achievement in our CRM efforts. Looking forward, we will continue our commitment to delivering innovative, highly scalable and accessible business intelligence solutions to our customers throughout the world.”
About CRM magazine

CRM magazine is the leading publication of the customer relationship management industry, covering sales, marketing, customer service, and strategy. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual CRM Evolution conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve customer-centric business initiatives, and leaders who recognize CRM as a key strategy for creating enhanced customer value in any industry. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or CRM in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.destinationCRM.com, or on Twitter at @CRM (http://twitter.com/CRM) and @destinationCRM (http://twitter.com/destinationCRM). The destinationCRM Web site (which is updated daily) and the monthly magazine are properties of CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.
About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence (BI) 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. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings 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

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Information Builders Helps Reform Healthcare by Enabling a Performance-Oriented Culture at Maasstad Hospital

KPIs and Dashboards Provide Actionable Healthcare Metrics to Managers, Physicians, and Administrators at Leading Dutch Hospital

NEW YORK, NY (September 02, 2009) –

national healthcare reform initiatives grab headlines throughout the U.S., Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is quietly demonstrating how physicians, nurses, and administrators can be held accountable to national performance standards. Using business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions from Information Builders, an independent leader in BI solutions, the 600-bed primary care facility is delivering current clinical and administrative data to help managers steer the hospital on a daily basis. Each department adheres to a set of daily metrics, encouraging a culture of performance and establishing best practices for common procedures, so doctors can be consistently compared to their peers.

The Netherlands has increased accountability and reduced healthcare costs over the last four decades. The ultimate goal is to introduce incentives for efficiency to guarantee sustainable health care expenditures over the long term – a familiar rallying cry for today’s U.S. politicians.

“No matter how healthcare is regulated, we must perform within our strategy to provide the best care at the lowest cost,” said Henri de Wit, manager of finance and business intelligence at Maasstad Hospital. “Strategic tools like Information Builders’ WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework help us meet our goals. We want to have satisfied patients as well as satisfied employees, so we are using this software to benchmark our critical processes and create quality of care standards.”

With help from Information Builders Professional Services department, Maasstad used WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) to capture more than 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) and present them to authorized personnel via secure, customizable dashboards. Built on top of Information Builders popular WebFOCUS BI platform, PMF includes pre-set roles for analysts, administrators, and information consumers. It also features more than 100 reports and graphs, hundreds of pre-built metric rules, and a variety of dashboards, which made it easy to deploy quickly. Users can personalize the dashboard environment by deciding which reports they wish to see and how they want them to be displayed.

“WebFOCUS PMF was easy to get up and running quickly,” de Wit said. “It is designed to quickly capture metrics and deploy dashboards.”

Maasstad’s performance information comes from a diverse set of sources. A ChipSoft transaction system gathers information from radiology, dialysis, administration, pharmacy, salary, financials, and other business domains. This information is loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, which serves as a staging point for delivering current information to the performance management system. Armed with this information, Maasstad uses a dual-management system, which places responsibility on the shoulders of both administrators and clinicians. WebFOCUS PMF enforces this management strategy with targeted dashboards that help each administrator, nurse, and doctor monitor the hospital’s cost and quality of care.

“Maasstad Hospital is proving that there is truth in the old adage: ‘You can’t improve what you can’t measure,'” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “This innovative institution is making hospital performance information easier to access, analyze, and comprehend in an effort to provide the best healthcare at the lowest possible cost.”

Watch Henri de Wit discuss how Maasstad Hospital leveraged WebFOCUS PMF to provide the best care at a lower cost:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWLoRGRmJHA

About Maasstad Hospital
Maasstad Hospital is a leading healthcare facility in Rotterdam, Holland. The hospital has 600 beds and grosses EUR230 million annually.

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. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings 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

Tags: Information Builders

Information Builders Delivers Support for IBM zIIP Chip

Enables Customers to Optimize Mainframe Environments

NEW YORK, NY (August 25, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced support for IBM System z/OS computer Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) in FOCUS 7.6.10 and WebFOCUS 7.7. Information Builder’s zIIP chip support represents the first and only BI platform optimized for the popular mainframe environment.

The zIIP chip was designed to handle BI workloads and other data intensive applications. Specialized mainframe processors like the zIIP allow users to offload work that might otherwise run on the mainframe’s general purpose chips.

“By extending support for the IBM zIIP, Information Builders is providing mainframe users a dramatic performance and cost advantage to expand their operations in the zIIP mainframe environment,” said Robert Hoey, general manager, Major Markets, Systems and Technology Group, IBM. “It represents the latest of many levels of support and interoperability Information Builders offers to IBM customers.”

For mainframe operations that need to drive greater value and performance, Information Builders has optimized FOCUS and WebFOCUS for the zIIP environment. The new versions perform the same mission-critical tasks, while maximizing processing power and reducing execution and response times, as well as delivering consistent application performance and solid customer service. By enabling efficient BI operations on the mainframe, Information Builders gives customers real-time, dynamic reporting with enough processing power to deliver large customer-facing applications, without incurring extra costs for setting up infrastructure or buying new machines or databases.

Leveraging the zIIP, Information Builders helps enhance mainframe operations of FOCUS and WebFOCUS by improving resource optimization to reduce latent workload demand, which the central processor can now absorb, and by stimulating visible performance improvement.

About 80 percent of the new FOCUS and WebFOCUS processing is zIIP-enabled, including computations, report formatting, aggregation, screening criteria, styling, and transaction processing. Information Builders’ new BI applications divert as much processing as possible to the zIIP, while monitoring and adjusting to optimize zIIP utilization. zIIP is accessible to mainframe FOCUS as of release 7.6 and WebFOCUS 7.7, available in the third and fourth quarters of 2009, respectively.

“Information Builders is dedicated to helping customers enhance value and optimize their BI deployments,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “By extending FOCUS and Web FOCUS to support the zIIP chip, we have dramatically recalculated the economics of mainframe business intelligence. Finally, business intelligence applications can leverage the genius of the zIIP environment without compromising accessibility or performance.”
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 one of 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. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings 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. More information is available at http://www.informationbuilders.com.

Source: Information Builders

Tags: Information Builders

Information Builders iWay Software Named to SD Times 100

iWay Named for Demonstrating Leadership and Innovation in SOA-Enablement

NEW YORK, NY (June 29, 2009) –

iWay Software, a division of Information Builders and an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, today announced that it has been named in the 2009 SD Times 100. Now in its seventh year, the SD Times 100 recognizes the top companies, organizations, and individuals that had the greatest impact on software development during the previous calendar year. Companies included on the list are selected by knowledge management practitioners, theorists, analysts, and vendors as well as their customers and colleagues.

iWay was recognized in the “SOA and Middleware” category, which identified companies that demonstrated leadership and innovation in the areas of service-oriented architecture- (SOA) enablement and in creating enterprise middleware. iWay SOA Middleware provides everything necessary to achieve real-time, near real-time, or batch integration more quickly and easily than competing tools and the “roll your own” approach. iWay provides standard connections to more than 300 back-office systems and data sources, enabling organizations to quickly and easily leverage technologies such as IBM’s WebSphere(TM), Microsoft’s BizTalk Server(TM), XML, Oracle, SAP, Informatica, and Java(TM).

“The software development industry has always been led by innovation, and that’s true even in today’s challenging economic climate,” said Alan Zeichick, editorial director of BZ Media’s SD Times. “When choosing the 2009 SD Times 100 winners, we carefully considered each organization’s products and services, reputation with enterprise development managers, and the new ideas and thought leadership that it has brought to the industry. Thanks to companies like iWay, the art of software development continues to advance at a rapid pace.”

“In an environment where businesses are being told to do more with less, an integrated information infrastructure is key to success,” said David Watson, vice president of iWay Software. “We’ve been providing our customers with the ability to do more with less for years, and being recognized for the effort is incredibly rewarding.”

For more information about the SD Times 100 winners visit www.sdtimes.com/link/33549.
About BZ Media

BZ Media LLC© (www.bzmedia.com) is a high-tech media company combining the best of print and Web-based publishing, offering industry-leading magazines, newspapers, Web sites and conferences.

BZ Media’s SD Times® (www.sdtimes.com) is the twice-monthly newspaper of record for the software development industry. SD Times reaches more than 60,000 subscribers in 131 countries. SD Times was recognized by Media Business Magazine as the fastest-growing IT publication in 2007.
About iWay Software

iWay Software’s integration methodology is simple: it uses a single, integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B), business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management (EIM) integration scenarios – without the use of custom code. Integration configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment supporting a JVM – or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software’s vendor-, platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true reusability.
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

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Ventana Research Selects Information Builders as Hot Vendor in the 2009 Value Index for Business Intelligence

Information Builders Certified to Best Represent Buyer Value Based on a Thorough Evaluation and Audit of the Company and Its Products

NEW YORK, NY (June 22, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that Ventana Research, a leading benchmark research and advisory services firm, named the company as the overall Hot Vendor in its first-ever Value Index on Business Intelligence. Information Builders secured a weighted top-ranking position for products and customer assurance supporting BI. According to Ventana Research, those earning the highest Hot Vendor classification are certified to best represent buyer value based on a thorough evaluation and audit of the company and its products based on research and verified facts.

“The market for business intelligence continues to be a top agenda item for CIOs and those in business and IT who want to gain the insight and knowledge to guide their business forward. Information Builders’ achievement as a Hot Vendor for BI is an indicator of their business focus and technology that is innovative and proven in enterprise deployments,” said Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of Ventana Research. “Our thorough analysis across the standard spectrum of technology evaluation criteria from product capability to vendor validation provides a more efficient and effective method to evaluate vendors and our Value Index represents those who were willing to be placed under our detailed examination.”

The Ventana Research Value Index for Business Intelligence in 2009 is an impartial guide resulting from more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers’ products. Based on research across all vertical industries and organizations of all sizes, the Value Index evaluates technology that can be used by business and IT for BI in the context of seven categories: adaptability, manageability, reliability, usability, functionality, total cost of ownership (TCO), and return on investment (ROI). Research for this 2009 report was conducted from November 2008 to April 2009. Products submitted for evaluation had to be available at the start of January 2009. The methodology used assesses product functionality, suitability-to-task, and the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. With the Value Index, businesses can meet the challenge of evaluating existing and future BI technologies, systems, and tools based on the specific needs of their company. The Value Index represents the value of a vendor’s offerings and relevant aspects of its products and services, using both a clear and accessible graphic representation in thermometer form and a precise numerical index.

Information Builders recently announced more than 100 functionality enhancements for its WebFOCUS portfolio to bolster essential BI capabilities without the need for customers to buy add-on products. Committed to driving the scope of BI beyond dashboards, OLAP, and report distribution, Information Builders offers search, predictive analytics, electronic publishing, performance management, and mobile BI, to give customers BI applications that are pervasive, inexpensive, and easy to deploy. The company was recently recognized by Ventana Research as the overall Hot Vendor in its first-ever Value Index on Performance Management.

“We are focused on expanding the role of BI at leading enterprises and government organizations worldwide,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “Being recognized first by Ventana as the hottest vendor for performance management and now for business intelligence are significant accolades speaking to the success of our efforts.”

To learn more about the Ventana Research Value Index for Performance Management in 2009 please visit http://www.ventanaresearch.com/valueindex.
About Ventana Research

Ventana Research is the leading benchmark research and advisory services firm. We provide expert guidance to help organizations manage and optimize performance – to become not only more efficient, but also more effective. Our unparalleled insights and best practices guidance are based on our rigorous research-based benchmarking indexes of people, processes, information, and technology across business and IT functions worldwide. The combination we offer of benchmark research, rigorous market coverage and in-depth knowledge of hundreds of technology providers means we can deliver business and technology education and expertise to our clients where and when needed. The Ventana Research Indexes – the Value Index and the Benchmark Index family – have redefined the research industry by providing accessible, easy-to-use research-based business and technology guidance to businesses. Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst coverage in the industry; more than 2.5 million business and IT professionals through our community of 85,000 professionals and network of media and association partners around the world benefit from Ventana Research’s insights. Ventana Research focuses on business and technology trends and best practices that maximize organizations’ potential to perform while reducing the time, cost, and risk and still achieve optimal outcomes. To learn how Ventana Research advances the maturity of organizations use of information and technology through benchmark research, market indexes, education, and advisory services, and also where to find us on Facebook or LinkedIn or how to follow us on Twitter or BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.
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. More information is available at http://www.informationbuilders.com.

Source: Information Builders

Tags: Information Builders

Ventana Research Names Information Builders Hot Vendor in the 2009 Value Index for Performance Management

Information Builders Secured a Weighted Top-Ranking for Products and Customer Assurance

NEW YORK, NY (June 16, 2009) –

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence ( BI ) solutions, today announced that Ventana Research, a leading benchmark research and advisory services firm, has selected the company as the overall Hot Vendor in its first-ever Value Index on Performance Management . Information Builders secured a weighted top-ranking position for products and customer assurance supporting performance management . According to Ventana Research, those earning the highest Hot Vendor classification are certified to best represent buyer value based on a thorough evaluation and audit of the company and its products based on research and verified facts.

“I want to congratulate Information Builders for achieving the Hot Vendor rating that is provided to only those vendors whose technology and commitment to help organizations is at the highest level,” said Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of Ventana Research. “Our research and assessment covers the complete spectrum of evaluation criteria from usability to manageability and provides a faster and smarter method to evaluate those vendors who were able to handle the scrutiny of our detailed analysis.”

The Ventana Research Value Index for Performance Management in 2009 is an impartial guide that evaluates technology that can be used by business and IT for performance management (PM) in the context of seven categories: adaptability, manageability, reliability, usability, functionality, total cost of ownership (TCO), and return on investment (ROI). It is the result of more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers’ products and how well they satisfy specific business and IT needs. It is based on research across all vertical industries and organizations of all sizes. The methodology used assesses product functionality, suitability-to-task, and the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. The Value Index represents the value of a vendor’s offerings and relevant aspects of its products and services, using both a clear and accessible graphic representation in thermometer form and a precise numerical index.

“Our Performance Management Framework solution is being used in many industry settings and Ventana recognizes the unique value this solution provides,” said David Cook, vice president of Performance Management Solutions at Information Builders. “The ability to rapidly deliver pervasive performance management, and leverage the WebFOCUS and iWay software platforms to do this, is a unique offering in the marketplace.” Information Builders performance management solutions are developed with the belief that everyone in an organization, from CEO to process clerk to supplier, needs access to good information so that everyone can understand and contribute toward strategic goals. Information Builders WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) is a flexible, modular PM framework that is easily tailored to help organizations create and manage a culture of performance and accountability. Customization abilities include personalized end user dashboards, metric blogging, print-quality publishing, mobile alerts, deep analytics, strategy authoring, and easy-to-use set-up wizards. With WebFOCUS PMF, each person monitors, analyzes, and manages performance in line with broader corporate objectives.

“The quality of Ventana Research services and research in the business intelligence and performance management markets is second to none,” said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. “Our top ranking is a credit to our investment in helping companies improve efficiency, effective business decision-making, and ROI.”
About Ventana Research

Ventana Research is the leading benchmark research and advisory services firm. We provide expert guidance to help organizations manage and optimize performance – to become not only more efficient, but also more effective. Our unparalleled insights and best practices guidance are based on our rigorous research-based benchmarking indexes of people, processes, information, and technology across business and IT functions worldwide. The combination we offer of benchmark research, rigorous market coverage and in-depth knowledge of hundreds of technology providers means we can deliver business and technology education and expertise to our clients where and when needed. The Ventana Research Indexes – the Value Index and the Benchmark Index family – have redefined the research industry by providing accessible, easy-to-use research-based business and technology guidance to businesses. Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst coverage in the industry; more than 2.5 million business and IT professionals through our community of 85,000 professionals and network of media and association partners around the world benefit from Ventana Research’s insights. Ventana Research focuses on business and technology trends and best practices that maximize organizations’ potential to perform while reducing the time, cost, and risk and still achieve optimal outcomes. To learn how Ventana Research advances the maturity of organizations use of information and technology through benchmark research, market indexes, education, and advisory services, and also where to find us on Facebook or LinkedIn or how to follow us on Twitter or BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange, visit www.ventanaresearch.com .
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

Tags: Information Builders

World’s Largest Paint Company Uses iWay to Optimize B2B Relationships

AkzoNobel Connects Easily With Business Units, Partners, and Suppliers Worldwide Via iWay Trading Partner Manager

NASHVILLE, TN (June 09, 2009) –

Integration technology and services from iWay Software are helping global industrial manufacturing leader AkzoNobel build its business the old fashioned way: by forging stronger relationships with customers and suppliers. The world’s largest paints and coatings company depends on iWay Trading Partner Manager to set up, manage, and monitor online relationships with partners and distributors across multiple trading networks. iWay Software, an Information Builders division and an innovator of enterprise integration solutions, deployed its Business-to-Business (B2B) Suite to help AkzoNobel manage this vast and diverse information landscape, simplifying exchanges among many different trading networks, message sets, and protocols while also connecting AkzoNobel’s internal business units worldwide.

“Our overriding objective is to make it easier for our partners to do business with us,” said Bas Van Amerom, eSupply chain manager at AkzoNobel. “iWay Trading Partner Manager simplifies our relationships. Now we can easily connect to partners no matter what kinds of systems they are using. iWay is boosting productivity and reducing costs for us.”

iWay Trading Partner Manager manages information among trading partners by making B2B interactions a natural extension of an organization’s SOA efforts. AkzoNobel also uses iWay Business Activity Monitor (BAM) to supply real-time information about the status and results of partner processes and transactions.

With help from Information Builders Professional Services, AkzoNobel standardized on iWay to streamline its vendor-managed inventory (VMI) processes, enabling materials suppliers to take responsibility for raw materials inventory. The integration initiative has had a positive impact on the bottom line by freeing up working capital and minimizing inventory carrying costs. Using iWay, suppliers can schedule deliveries whenever they want. This enables them to optimize quantities of on-hand materials based on real-time forecasts of manufacturing schedules and production runs. “Lowering the required physical stock has advantages to everybody in the supply chain, but we need to be able to reliably share information to make it happen,” said Van Amerom. “iWay Software helped us construct a B2B gateway to set up and maintain thousands of partner relationships in a highly reliable framework.”

AkzoNobel is globally organized into 18 business units. Suppliers and customers connect to these business units via a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. AkzoNobel needed a central hub to facilitate these connections. Within six months, the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based company was testing system-to-system interfaces via iWay Trading Partner Manager and monitoring those connections with iWay’s BAM. Formerly, establishing an interface with a new vendor could take AkzoNobel many days of coding. According to Van Amerom, iWay has cut that time nearly in half.

“iWay has a successful history of helping customers tackle extraordinarily complex infrastructure challenges with our B2B solutions,” said Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders. “As AkzoNobel has learned, having the right technical infrastructure in place allows a company to focus on relationships rather than wrestling with technology.”
About AkzoNobel

Based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, AkzoNobel makes and supplies a huge range of paints, coatings and specialty chemicals. As a major producer of specialty chemicals, AkzoNobel supplies industries worldwide with quality ingredients for life’s essentials. The company has 60,000 employees in more than 80 countries. Its pro forma 2007 revenue totaled EUR 14.4 bln.
About iWay Software

iWay Software’s integration methodology is simple: it uses a single, integrated set of graphical design tools to assemble powerful pre-built components for enterprise-class business-to-business (B2B) integration, business process automation (BPA), or enterprise information management (EIM) integration scenarios – without the use of custom code. Integration configurations can be deployed in a stand-alone manner to any environment supporting a JVM – or to Web application servers from any vendor. iWay delivers the fastest, most cost-effective, and simplest way to integrate and streamline critical business processes. iWay Software’s vendor-, platform-, and protocol-neutral solutions achieve the promise of SOA: true reusability.
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

Tags: Information Builders

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

Tags: Information Builders