Ascential Software has announced its support for the release of Business Objects Application Foundation 2.5 from its partner, Business Objects, the world`s leading provider of business intelligence solutions. The support is valid and applicable with immediate effect in South Africa through Ascential business partners and Business Objects` reseller base.
Application Foundation 2.5 offers users a framework for building dashboards and real-time analytics into their applications, enabling quick access to and easy visualisation of customers` critical business metrics.
Under a strategic reseller agreement signed in July last year, Business Objects resells Ascential`s DataStage data integration platform to provide Application Foundation 2.5 customers with the ability to access and extract enterprise data through DataStage from any source seamlessly for use by the Application Foundation framework.
DataStage accesses and extracts data from virtually all potential data sources, including enterprise applications, XML or e-business data, Web and e-mail logs, flat files, mainframes and data warehouse environments. DataStage also allows Business Objects customers to manage and bi-directionally exchange meta data within their business intelligence environments.
"DataStage is the backbone of analytics, which help customers better understand their data for more informed decision-making," says Julian Field, GM for Ascential Software South Africa. "Through our acquisition late last year of Torrent Systems and our subsequent integration of its core technology with DataStage, we can now scale to support the very largest of databases. This is important for Business Objects customers, given the magnitude of some of its customer sites, which number thousands of users."
"Application Foundation offers a proactive approach for enabling companies to keep informed and up-to-date about important data," says Gary Lawrence, country manager for Business Objects in SA. "Through Application Foundation`s real-time and alerting capabilities, customers can receive reports via e-mail, personal digital assistant or phone.
"Now more than ever, organisations are under increasing pressure to be event-driven, to be aware of and react to changing business conditions as quickly as possible. These events often come from many different sources and require responses to be executed through multiple systems. With Application Foundation, Business Objects is combining real-time analytics with an enterprise-wide view of the business, delivering real-time alerts, analytics, and actions in response to changes in various operational systems across the enterprise."
Application Foundation 2.5 provides extended functionality that enables companies to build flexible dashboards, giving users a top-level view of key metrics and the ability to drill down from any metric to the operational details. This provides a huge improvement over traditional executive information system (EIS) dashboards that had little flexibility or connection with a company`s operational systems and were restricted to executive users.
Application Foundation includes set-based and time series analysis capabilities that enable business users to understand and predict trends, making complex analysis easy and accessible to users throughout the organisation. With Application Foundation 2.5, customers can build dashboards that recognise critical changes in the underlying data and alert users to these changes.
Customers can use Application Foundation to integrate real-time notification into their applications, enabling the application to be aware of changes in multiple transactional systems as they happen.
The challenges inherent in feeding data to such an environment can only be addressed by a tool such as DataStage, Field says. "What we are describing here is an intense business intelligence environment whose boundaries are not easily defined or proscribed and where change in source and target data occurs frequently. In this light, the cooperation between the companies will be of great value to joint customers."
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