CEO Gerald Cohen Showcases Next-Generation BI and Integration Technologies That Break Barriers
Las Vegas, NV – May 21, 2007 – Information Builders, the leader in production business intelligence (BI) solutions, at its 26th annual Summit User Conference today announced the release of WebFOCUS 7.6.1, highlighting dozens of industry-leading initiatives including process-driven alerts, improved Microsoft Office integration with new Excel plug-ins, and portable dashboard and collaboration capabilities in Active Reports. The latter is part of an initiative called active technologies that offers access to and analysis of data to everyone inside and outside the enterprise even when they are not connected to the Internet. The analytical engine is delivered as part of the report. More than 100 sessions, mostly led by customers, keep the conference to a furious pace of hands-on learning, discussions with Information Builders executives and technical staff and great networking with partners and other industry participants.
One Solution for All Users
Many organizations still rely heavily on spreadsheets as their form of BI, based on the flexible nature of the product. Recognizing the need to support more integration with Microsoft Office and bridge the gap between spreadsheet management and spreadsheet usage, Information Builders has introduced a new plug-in for Excel from WebFOCUS. Quick Data is an Excel add-in file, which connects Excel directly to the WebFOCUS reporting engine and leverages more than 300 adapters to give users access to a virtually unlimited amount of enterprise information. Additionally, because Quick Data is built on the software-as-a-service principle, maintenance is much easier than with other products on the market. With Quick Data for Excel users can:
- Build WebFOCUS reports from within Excel
- Access all enterprise data with more than 300 iWay adapters
- Combine multiple reports from various data sources into a single worksheet
- Provide links to the WebFOCUS reporting engine with a standalone add-in file
- Install quickly and easily
- Automatically inherit upgrades to the WebFOCUS environment
- Fully integrate with Excel Query
- Harness the full power of WebFOCUS’s automatic Excel generation, including automatic creation of named ranges and computations and totals output as native Excel formulas
Real-Time Alerts Become a Reality
The integration of WebFOCUS with iWay Software’s industry-leading enterprise service bus empowers companies to build and manage end-to-end operational processes that incorporate the intelligence necessary to create and disseminate information, make decisions, and take various courses of action based on specific events. The latest innovation of these joint solutions is a real-time alert engine that allows users to receive real-time updates into processes that enable them to respond to events in a more targeted, intelligent manner.
For example, a customer phones into a call center with a complaint. The support representative handles the call and enters all of the detailed information into its system. Upon pressing the enter key to complete the transaction, an iWay listener picks up the transaction, checks the database and determines that the account is of premiere status. iWay Service Manager then sends a request to WebFOCUS ReportCaster to run an immediate report and deliver the detailed report to the sales manager and branch supervisor as they would be most concerned about this sensitive account and how to address the concern.
New Initiatives With Active Technologies Deliver Industry Firsts
Information Builders continues to demonstrate its innovation with active technologies in this new release of WebFOCUS. With Active Reports, no software is needed on the desktop because information is delivered via a browser, with an analytical engine embedded, making it ready for user analysis. This type of technology is perfectly suited to the many road warriors who do not have time to analyze data or build reports Information Builders has evolved the dashboard concept with Active Dashboards, creating a platform to deliver information to the occasionally connected user, giving mobile workers and field personnel a complete view of the business at a glance, with the ability to slice and dice the data without being connected to the network. Active Dashboards combine the interaction between reports and graphs with different scenarios, which results in a rich payload of connected information ready for analysis. Users can take the dashboards anywhere, e-mail them to anyone else, and update them as needed, making information truly portable. Additionally, in the latest version of WebFOCUS, Information Builders has extended beyond the interactive capabilities of Active Reports and added collaboration functionality. Users analyze data to find valuable information, but to make it actionable they need to share it with other users.
With the new features in Active Reports, users can share the steps in their analysis, so that another user can follow it in a guided manner. An analyst for example, can save each step of the analysis in Active Reports on a separate tab, so another user can go through the tabs and gain complete insight on the data. This innovation will move users away from creating static stories in PowerPoint, since storyboards in Active Reports can be shared with anyone, who in turn can add comments and additional steps to the story, resulting in portable full analyses.
“We believe in creating ways to help companies conduct business without barriers,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. “Technology should enable collaboration, not hinder it. Whether it’s removing barriers to accessing and integrating data or to delivering information to huge numbers of users, WebFOCUS is all about proliferating the use of business intelligence to improve decision-making.”
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 subsidiary iWay Software provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose integration engines 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 live up to the company motto: Your business. No Barriers.
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 1,600 people and has more than 350 business partners. www.informationbuilders.com
Tags: industry first, Information Builders
