Industry’s First Portable BI Solution Now Brings Analytics and Decision-Making Power to Handhelds
New York, NY � December 6, 2006 � Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced that WebFOCUS Active Reports, the industry’s first portable BI solution, are now available on mobile devices, including Treos, Dell PDAs, HP PDAs, Samsung devices, and others. Any device running the Opera Mobile browser can access and interact with Active Reports. This enhancement enables users to leverage the power of portable analytics, literally, whenever, wherever, and however they need to receive reports.
As the dynamics of today’s workforce changes and the number of telecommuters and field employees increases, more business decisions are being made through smartphones and other mobile devices than from traditional desktops and laptops. Most mission-critical information is being delivered to mobile devices via e-mail, so making business analytics for decision-making truly portable requires the ability to receive, view, and interact with reports on mobile devices in the same way a user would on a desktop or laptop.
WebFOCUS Active Reports are architected to be cross-browser compatible and operate in connected or disconnected mode. This technological benefit means that users can view Active Reports in all browsers, which is the most common type of interaction, and unlike other solutions, Active Reports utilize standard interactive technologies that make deployment and dissemination of information very easy.
“As organizations look toward becoming true ‘anywhere enterprises,’ they need to ensure information can be accessed, synthesized, and acted upon by employees from any location at any point in time,” said Tara Pottebaum, analyst for the Yankee Group. “Bringing business intelligence to mobile devices, companies can extend their enterprise and allow employees more ways to get at business-critical data from anywhere.”
Active Reports do not require custom software installed on the mobile device. (Other solutions require Java, plug-ins, or custom software.) Active Reports also do not require special servers or Web services to generate and deliver the report, alternative “mobile” formats, or custom specifications for how to write or format the report to make it viewable on mobile devices.
Mobile Active Reports allow for the distribution of information with basic analytical functions to hand-held devices and can be triggered from scheduled alerts, forwarded in an e-mail, or pulled via drill-downs and direct access to sites. Examples of active reports that might be delivered to a mobile device are:
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Executive reports on key metrics
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Portable performance management scorecards
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Operations metrics monitoring
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Sales indicators
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Account information
“Delivering BI to a mobile device is not new,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. “What’s new is that with this latest innovation around Active Reports, we have taken the technology from a push form of simply sending information, to an interactive form where users can drill down on data, visualize it, and make decisions based on real-time data.”
About Information Builders
An industry innovator for more than 31 years, Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company’s WebFOCUS product � the industry’s most 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 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 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners.www.informationbuilders.com
