Solution Combines Business Intelligence, Integration, and Enterprise Search Capabilities to Unlock Critical Business Data Throughout the Enterprise
New York, NY – March 6, 2006 – Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today introduced WebFOCUS Intelligent Search, a pioneering, easy-to-use tool that harnesses the power of enterprise search, BI reporting, and integration technology to tap into previously inaccessible and unsearchable enterprise records. By linking unstructured and structured data, WebFOCUS Intelligent Search gives business users full access to enterprise information, enabling intelligent organizational decisions.
The demand for extensive enterprise search capabilities is on the rise as companies recognize the convenience of searching corporate data through simple keyword searches, resulting in productivity enhancements and more insightful decision-making. IDC estimates the enterprise search software market reached a total worth of $1 billion in 2005.* However search results are only useful if the information is accessible.
iWay’s integration capabilities enable structured data sources to be included in enterprise searches in tandem with accessible structured data sources such as HTML files. Information Builders’ WebFOCUS can then merge and analyze the data to provide easy-to-understand BI reports from the formerly disjointed information. WebFOCUS Intelligent Search represents the long-anticipated convergence of three key technology trends: unstructured document search, structured data search, and BI-powered enterprise reporting.
“We’ve relied on Information Builders and iWay Software to provide comprehensive business intelligence and integration solutions for years, putting critical business information at our executives’ fingertips,” said John Sheridan, director of IT at Administaff. “Adding enterprise search capabilities to this powerful mix gives our executives full access to information throughout our extended network to make mission-critical decisions and ensure continued corporate success.”
“The Googleization of BI is inexorable,” says Wayne Eckerson, director of research and services at TDWI, a business intelligence research and education organization. “Business professionals are wondering why they can use Google and other search engines to locate billions of documents scattered across millions of machines worldwide in a matter of nanoseconds but can’t do the same for corporate data stored on a few dozen systems in the company data center. WebFOCUS intelligent search marks a major step towards bridging these two worlds.”
In today’s modern enterprise, all core applications are fed information from messages that flow through the networks and connect the enterprise. The iWay Enterprise Index monitors these networks and transforms all messages and passes them to the customer’s Google Search Appliance. The index chronicles any and all available enterprise data regardless of its current form (e.g., B2B, EDI, ERP, flat files, or Web services). The search interface is the front-end of the system, and no user training is required. Hits from the entered search terms provide users with relevant information stored in the core applications. Because Information Builders’ WebFOCUS can natively read every database and application, WebFOCUS then uses algorithms to connect the search terms with the hit information, original indexed material, and the target to which the message was sent. WebFOCUS creates a report from that data target, enriching the available report for the requested information. The result is rapid, at-your-fingertips retrieval of information that previously would have been locked up in proprietary information systems. With WebFOCUS Intelligent Search, users can quickly and easily generate BI reports from formerly disjointed, unreachable data.
“Google’s corporate search solution is revolutionizing how today’s business users look for information,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. “WebFOCUS Intelligent Search adds the BI strength of WebFOCUS and comprehensive integration of iWay to chronicle and refine enterprise search results, providing executives the answers to the questions they didn’t even know they had.”
For more information on WebFOCUS Intelligent Search, please visit: www.informationbuilders.com/search. For more information on the iWay Enterprise Index, please visit: http://www.iwaysoftware.com/google.
About Information Builders
Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company’s WebFOCUS product � the industry’s most scalable, secure, and flexible � is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS’ empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data � by accessing it all from legacy to data warehouse � is unmatched.
Information Builders’ award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 31 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. www.informationbuilders.com/cif
