5.24.18
Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data management solutions, today unveiled five new innovations that enrich customers’ ability to create actionable analytics, based on trusted data. The company has advanced the capabilities of its WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform in the key areas of data science, content reusability, data management, intelligent search, and storytelling. The technology enhancements will be showcased at Information Builders’ annual Summit User Conference this week.
Information Builders’ widely acclaimed WebFOCUS platform helps organizations worldwide turn data into insights that accelerate strategic and operational decision-making, and drive desired business outcomes. These latest innovations reinforce the solution’s ability to adapt to the diverse range of data needs across an enterprise – and enable customers to get actionable analytics into the hands of all user groups.
Advanced Analytics for Data Science
Information Builders has expanded WebFOCUS capabilities for data scientists, enabling them to call their procedures from within the platform for preprocessing and bidirectional passing of data and the presentation of findings. The company has also established new integrations with data science platforms and languages, such as RScript, RServe, and Python, and added more built-in statistical operations (e.g., clustering, correlations, probability distributions, and regressions). Additionally, a new WebFOCUS extension provides “What-If” prescriptive functionality for both analysts and everyday users.
Analytics Content Reusability
WebFOCUS users now have an unprecedented ability to interconnect analytics content and objects to improve exploration, reusability, and ROI of authored content. This new capability leverages WebFOCUS Reporting Objects to allow multidirectional linking of reporting and charting content so that users do not have to continuously reinvent the wheel by recreating analytics. Organizations can create a library of interconnected analytical views, which significantly reduces the amount of content authoring required to support users.
Enhanced Data Management
The company has introduced several capabilities to further help customers achieve rapid access to timely, accurate information across all systems, processes, and stakeholders. WebFOCUS features a new data preparation web console, a new visual data connector, and an upload wizard. Additionally, users can take advantage of more worldwide mapping geometries, which provide drill down to postal codes worldwide. The BI and analytics platform also features adapters to SAP S/4 HANA, Apache Spark SQL, Blockchain, and SQL Server Azure DW.
Intelligent BI and Analytics Search
Information Builders has enhanced InfoSearch, a capability that enables users to perform search analytics and quickly discover business intelligence assets by searching a combination of content titles, metadata, and data elements. It makes use of natural language and a type-ahead search index to address the most common issue with self-service environments – having too much similar or same content to navigate. Most business users are more familiar with the data they are researching than the analytics assets that explain the meaning of their data. InfoSearch allows them to simply search by account name, customer name, product name, or any other key characteristic of their data and find all the assets that explain the data element in detail. The capability can be likened to Google for BI and analytics.
Visual Storytelling
WebFOCUS now offers tools for users to easily develop personalized, fully data-driven infographics for the masses. This new, intuitive capability allows organizations to leverage existing data for visual storytelling – without the need for professional design experience or software specialists. WebFOCUS users can take their data to the next level by transforming everyday communications with customers, partners, and prospects into highly visual and compelling infographics. They can parameterize and instantly distribute millions of infographics to large audiences, after selecting from an array of easy-to-use templates and rich set of graphics embedded within WebFOCUS Data Objects.
In addition to these innovations, Information Builders will debut enhancements to its iWay data management technology, delivering unparalleled support for blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), modern data integration, and more.
Kevin Quinn, vice president of Product Management, Information Builders, said:
“Information Builders’ partnership approach to every customer engagement uniquely informs our development efforts, giving us the ability to quickly identify and anticipate the capabilities organizations need to improve data-driven decision-making. These latest innovations are a direct product of those symbiotic relationships and further exemplify our pledge to help customers derive maximize operational and business value from BI and analytics.”
