Enterprise 6 comprises a suite of integrated BI products that include staple BI analysis platform, analytic applications, and data integration products (acquired from Acta Technology Inc last year).
Officials at Business Objects, which maintains dual headquarters in Paris, France and San Jose, California, said the two key themes of Enterprise 6 are depth of functionality and breadth of integration. Release 6 is a very significant release for us…it’s the result of a lengthy investment process and demonstrates our clear leadership across the board in BI, Chris Caren, Business Objects’ VP of worldwide product marketing told analysts earlier this week.
Given the sheer range of improved functionality, Enterprise 6 could really be considered a brand new product, rather than an updated release. Everything in the platform is new, revised and enhanced, Caren said.
One of the significant areas of improvement is a brand new version of WebIntelligence 6, a Web-based tool that integrates ad hoc query, analysis and reporting. The new features in WebIntelligence 6 are primarily aimed at improving ease of user for report consumers, and include multi-block reports (i.e. the ability to combine multiple data and charts in one document), user-defined calculations, report component templates, and HTML report creation. In a separate announcement, Business Objects also said that it had forged a VAR agreement with PeopleSoft Inc to resell its WebIntelligence software as part of PeopleSoft’s EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) suite.
Enterprise 6 also provides enhancements to the BI portal, an information delivery component of the platform. New end user portal functions, such as interactive sorting and filtering, easier document navigation, and one click personalization simplify the access and organization of information in way that makes sense to business users. There is also something for portal developers, who can now take advantage of active server page (ASP) and java server page (JSP) interfaces for customization of the BI portal.
Enterprise 6 also includes a new modular enterprise data warehouse – called BusinessObjects Warehouse – that collects data from disparate systems and makes it usable for enterprise BI applications. The population process is driven by connectors powered by BusinessObjects Data Integrator, a data integration tool the company inherited from the Acta acquisition.
The new warehouse extends Business Objects’ analytic application strategy in several ways, not least making the analytic data model available as a standalone component for developers and partners to shoot at. The warehouse is geared around subject-specific data marts – customers, products, suppliers, etc. The initial focus will be on customer intelligence. But Business Objects says that it will broaden the focus into finance in the second half of 2003.
Advancements in Enterprise 6’s metadata integration and validation now extend across the entire platform and across packaged analytic applications. Unifying all the layers of the stack affords many benefits, not least the auto-generation of Business Objects semantic mapping layer across both environments, which in turn dramatically facilitates change and updated propagation strategies. The metadata management capabilities even allow for the surfacing of real-time alerts from operational systems out of management dashboards.
The remainder of Enterprise 6’s enhancements focus on increased scalability and performance; specifically a new connection pooling process, a new login server, a faster full client calculation engine, a multi-threaded Web report engine, and page-by-page report generation. Business Objects claims to have achieved 100% improvement in performance and over 150% improvement in response times on various platforms compared to version 5 of the product.
An improved administration console streamlines the configuration and installation process providing easier setup, deployment, and maintenance of the BI system. There are also security and reporting SDKs to encourage partners to embed Enterprise 6 functionality into third-party applications.
Business Objects says that Enterprise 6 has been tested and evaluated by more than 100 customers worldwide. The system is in production on Windows, and a general release on Windows and several Unix flavors (HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris) is expected by mid-May.
Source: Computerwire
