Johannesburg, 30 Oct 2009
Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) has partnered with US-based Visual Crossing, giving it access to the company's map visualisation software for the MicroStrategy platform.
Visual Crossing combines the MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) platform with Visual Crossing Map Services and provides users with visual data analysis. The company was formed by a group of MicroStrategy alumni and geographical information systems (GIS) experts.
“Overlaying data on maps demonstrates trends by geography that gives businesses greater insight into the impact on their revenue,” says Aubrey van Aswegen, MD of KID, one of South Africa's leading providers of MicroStrategy.
“The combination of tools identifies geographic trends to save companies money, increase profitability and reduce risk. They deliver interactive and presentation-quality maps that enable organisations to comprehend hundreds of pages of grid data in seconds.”
The tool is based on enterprise-scalable J2EE architecture and the platform is packaged for deployment and configuration to eliminate costly consulting engagements.
The MicroStrategy Visualisation Extensions provide seamless integration between the MicroStrategy platform and the Spatial Map Server. The full visualisation creation, viewing, and analysis life cycle is available from within the MicroStrategy Web product and enables users to easily switch between viewing modes.
“Proper integration requires a fundamental understanding of the MicroStrategy product and Visual Crossing's team of developers includes MicroStrategy experts,” says Van Aswegen. “There's no thin facade of non-secure or non-standard techniques. The two products are integrated right through from browsing to data manipulation such as page-by, pivoting, OLAP Services functionality such as view filter, and even prompting and drilling.”
Visual Crossing was formed by a group of MicroStrategy alumni and GIS experts tasked with creating a spatial engine for business intelligence platforms, and it has offices in the US, the UK and Germany.
Visual crossing enables visualisations to be printed using the MicroStrategy Web printing functionality or included in a Report Services document or dashboard, and the tool also supports Flash and AJAX modes.
“Visualisation is becoming increasingly critical in many industries and is offering financial services, retail, and other sectors' unrivalled competitive advantages,” says Van Aswegen.
KID will sell, support and maintain Visual Crossing for MicroStrategy in South Africa. Visual Crossing is participating in the beta programme of the upcoming MicroStrategy 9, which will be released later in 2009, and is currently in testing.
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