We watch the market closely for new business intelligence platforms.  Although we maintain technology independence, Information Builders’ WebFOCUS is rapidly becoming one of our core BI technologies – alongside Microsoft and Cognos.

We are busy developing our skills base to incorporate IB products and have already made some quick gains with this technology. 

Information Builders’ WebFOCUS is a reporting environment that offers a complete suite of integrated tools - performance management, dashboards, scorecards, and enterprise search reporting; dynamic information delivery with real-time alerts; e-mail distribution and report archiving;  data visualization; query and analysis capabilities; portable analytics; and predictive modelling and scoring.

Information Builders enables agile information solutions with business intelligence and integration technologies.

WebFOCUS business intelligence platform connects to any enterprise system or application and enables simple and intuitive interaction with information

WebFOCUS’ simple, Web-based information access and delivery opens up business intelligence to the non-technical workers who execute operational processes.  Guided ad hoc capabilities allow users to instantly generate their own reports on the fly, simply by customising options at runtime.  Users can change a report’s dimensions, measures, filters, drill downs, output formats, and even apply an OLAP structure on the fly – all at runtime.  These reports can be saved and refreshed at any time, or automatically updated and delivered at scheduled intervals. This eliminates the extensive time and effort needed for IT teams to produce and maintain high volumes of one-off reports, and empowers end users with instant access to actionable information.  WebFOCUS supports an unlimited number of users, multiple application types, and a wide variety of information consumers, with minimal hardware requirements and administration costs.

Reports can be created against more than 300 distinct databases and information sources – including relational, legacy, ERP, CRM, data staged in warehouses (data warehousing), cubes, or data marts, Web services, and real-time data from operational systems. WebFOCUS runs on all enterprise platforms, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, and IBM (System i , AS/400) and System z (mainframes). WebFOCUS provides full Web services support and can be leveraged within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).