There are three guiding projects that we’re working on, said Kevin Quinn, vice president of product marketing at New York-based Information Builders.
He said the first is to push BI into a non-technical business user audience that utilizes Information Builders’ Active Reports technology which the company developed a year ago to make standard reports look and act like an HTML file.
We’ve recently extended that technology to the notion of active dashboards that allows business users to combine and link multiple Active Reports to a tabbed dashboard screen, he said. We’re effectively providing ‘lite’ BI analysis inside of a dashboard screen.
The second area of development is around better support for remote (mobile) and disconnected BI analysis. Quinn said WebFocus will introduce the concept of mobile favorites. The concept works by letting online WebFocus users to specify the reports they want to access while they’re disconnected from the corporate network as mobile favorite. The system then prompts users for an email address to send links to all these favorites for access offline.
The third area of development builds on the Magnify search capabilities that Information Builders introduced last May to allow users to reach into real-time data, messages, and transactions flowing through corporate networks.
Magnify uses metadata from Google and other third-party search engines to index structured data records, create intelligent categories of results and provide access to WebFocus BI functions directly from the search interface. It leverages data integration technology from Information Builders’ iWay division, which is what enables the engine to also capture data on message queues and buses.
iWay’s Enterprise Index technology basically adds metatags to the messages and pushes it into search engines for indexing and Magnify uses that metatag information to place relevance-ordered search results in a visual tree-like display for easy navigation.
We’ve initially linked Magnify’s iWay Enterprise Index to monitor networks, transform messages and pass them to Google’s Search appliance. But that’s only a precursor to us now providing listeners to transactions coming into company and allowing users to write business logic to do something with that transaction, Quinn said. Magnify will now be able to read transactions and give metadata tree structure list, tell you about metadata related to that transaction.
Quinn referred to this as real-time transactional search, which he said will allow reports to be run against the current status of operational databases. In essence, we’re pointing BI search beyond a data warehousing and analytic mode to a transactional mode that deals with real-time information coming into the system, he said.
To enable this, Quinn said Information Builders is integrating open source search technology from the Apache Lucene project, which he said will open up more development opportunities.
Lucene is a full-featured text search and indexing engine library written entirely in Java, making it suitable for applications that require cross-platform search. At its core is the notion of a document containing fields of text, which makes Lucene particularly flexible in terms of handling different file formats and extracting metadata from those formats.
Tying into the Google Search Appliance has allowed us to deliver complete package without third-party issues, he said. But it can get complex and expensive when searching across millions or transactions. Lucene engine’s gives us more search programmability.
Quinn said that Information Builders is planning to give WebFocus a better front-end for Microsoft Office tools like Excel and also hinted at leveraging certain iWay data integration technologies, like Services Manager, to make its BI platform more process and alert-aware. He said that Information Builders is working on specific integrations of iWay with WebFocus as well as new product bundles. Our notion of transactional BI search is really a way to get more timely access to data that hasn’t made its way into a corporate database as yet, he said.
Most of the functional improvements, including the enhanced mobile and disconnected analysis capabilities, will appear in the WebFocus 6.6.4 release that is expected in the next month or so. Information Builders also plans another maintenance release before the end of this year that will support the Lucene search engine.
The next major release of WebFocus, version 8.0, is expected sometime next year and will include more user-friendly OLAP tools, a major revision of the back-end ETL capabilities for supporting real-time data warehouses, the addition of more Ajax technologies for greater user interactivity with BI reports and data, and new adapters into unstructured data sources like FileNet and EMC Doucmentum repositories.
