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WebFocus 8 Will Push Envelope for ‘Real-Time’ BI

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: BI, business intelligence, Information Builders, WebFocus, performance management, data quality,

Information Builders is pushing the envelope for business intelligence (BI) that can drive smarter decision-making for real-time operations with WebFocus 8, which will ship later this year. The upgrade sports improvements for data integrity, performance management, advanced analytics and end-user personalization.

Today's business climate dictates that organizations take a proactive, versus reactive, approach to managing the business, Michael Corcoran, senior vice president of Information Builders told Integration Developer News.  “As a result, we’ve worked a lot with customers to help them improve decision-making throughout the organization.” 

At its heart, WebFocus 8 features look to take BI beyond traditional “historical analysis” work and deliver more operational or real-time BI to many more workers, Corcoran told IDN.  “The features we focused on are directly linked to our ability to ensure data accessibility and integrity across data warehouses and other key datastores, including third-party data and analytics, and the ability of users to apply powerful analytics to that data to help business operations,” he said.

Inside WebFocus 8 and
4 Critical Areas for Real-Time BI
In specific, WebFocus 8’s upgrades span 4 key areas critical to delivering real-time BI to both analysis and operational users.  Those areas include: (1) data integrity; (2) performance management; (3) business intelligence (real-time access); and (4) advanced analytics

1. 1. Data Integrity Being able to obtain real-time visibility for BI, Corcoran told IDN, starts with helping users tap into many repositories for data, and be sure that their data is clear and reliable. “Delivering data quality, and eliminating ‘dirty data,’ is a core for successful BI, and WebFocus 8 offers new data quality technologies that avoid problems such as duplicate records, incomplete or inconsistent data.” Corcoran told IDN.
   
   WebFocus 8 includes new data cleansing and enrichment features, along with data profiling, real-time data quality management (DQM), and master data management (MDM) components. All these enhancements are designed to enable companies to merge and manage data assets from a variety of contact points, including data warehouses, source operational systems, and third-party data, Corcoran said.
2. Performance Management WebFocus 8 also will ship with a fully-integrated Performance Management Framework (PMF), Corcoran said, which is seamlessly linked to analytical and operational reporting features. The result: PMF more closely linking business strategies to results. WebFocus 8 also adds what Corcoran called “key risk indicators,” which will let users tie risk into considerations for how to meeting performance objectives and overall strategic goals.
   
   Visually, performance management can be monitored via PMF scorecards, dashboards, and strategy maps, all of which can drill down directly to detail-level data contained within WebFocus operational reports. The UIs can also leverage Adobe Flex technology and charts. Various workers can also better collaborate via WebFocus’ InfoAssist ad hoc reporting tool or third-party gadgets.
3. Business Intelligence (Real-Time Events) WebFocus 8 also sports an Activity Monitor for business activity monitoring (BAM) and the CEP Enable capability for complex event processing capture end-to-end transaction and workflow data across multiple applications and business processes, such as B2B, summarizing and displaying metrics to automate intelligence decisions or enable managers to make time-critical decisions.
   
   Thanks to support from iWay integration technologies under the covers WebFocus 8 will tap into data and information regarding on-going operational and transaction data, Corcoran said. This capability “can now apply that [data from] on-going business activities and CEP, and really understand the impact of practices or policies for day-to-day operations,” and better pinpoint where improvements can be made for profitability or customer satisfaction, Corcoran said.
4. Advanced Analytics WebFocus 8 adds two new advanced analytic components: Visual Discovery 8 for visual analytics and RStat 1.2 for predictive analytics.
   
   • Visual Discovery leverages 64-bit desktop architectures to represent tens of millions of rows of data in interactive visual displays, allowing users to review years of historical data in seconds, and
     
   • WebFocus RStat compiles predictive modules and embeds them into operational reports, dashboards, and custom applications. Integrating multiple sources of data, analytics, visualization, and predictive models, these applications drive significant improvements in areas such as business forecasting, fraud detection, social services, and law enforcement.

WebFocus 8 Other Features, First Reactions
Further, WebFocus 8 is the first certified BI platform to comply with Open Web Security Application Security Project (OWASP), to ensure application integrity and security. It also delivers an improved a set of BI portal features for robust dashboarding that lets end users personalize their screens and better collaborate with one another. Further, new WebFocus Active Technologies allow users to create portable BI applications, with ad hoc reporting, animated charting, and data sets for disconnected users. Devs can also incorporate Web 2.0 gadgets.

One analyst firm said WebFocus 8 is taking BI in a valuable direction for companies. “[T]o achieve pervasive BI that supports enterprise-wide decision-making processes, organizations need to focus on much more than providing query and analysis functionality to so-called power users," said Dan Vesset, IDC’s vice president of business analytics research, in a statement.  WebFocus 8’s suite of data quality, governance analytics and dashboarding “takes another important step toward improved support for these functions," Vesset added.

WebFocus 8, available now in beta, will be generally available in Q4 2010, according to Information Builders. 

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