Information Builders, the leader in Web business intelligence for real-time information delivery, today announced the new WebFOCUS Information Delivery Platform, a complete solution that will allow organisations to deliver essential, time-critical information at the point of business to the extended enterprise - employees, partners, suppliers, customers, and prospects.
The Information Delivery Platform, unveiled during Summit 2002, Information Builders` annual user conference, provides a single infrastructure for query and analysis, enterprise-wide report access and distribution, enterprise information portals, and beyond-enterprise information-delivery systems.
"Business intelligence is moving away from a highly specialized pursuit for analysts and becoming more usable by ordinary business people. Companies are also starting to use BI systems to deliver information outside their firewalls," according to David Folger, vice president of Web & Collaboration Strategies at Meta Group.
"Information Builders provides a very flexible platform for tapping a large number of data sources, including legacy systems, delivering information in real-time, and allowing users to select the parameters of the particular information they want."
"The current business climate mandates that technology immediately impacts the bottom line, while reducing total cost of ownership," said Gerald D Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. "Our customers have widely deployed extranet and Internet applications that extend to millions of users and replace expensive manual and paper-based methods of information distribution."
Organisations worldwide use WebFOCUS for large-scale information delivery at the point of business. Over 30 000 Ford Motor Company dealers can access warranty-trend reports via the Web. A major US bank allows 200 000 commercial partners to analyse transaction activity. And Moneris Solutions, Canada`s largest processor of credit and debit card transactions, enables 300 000 merchants to analyse sales, forecast, and growth trends and access statements and historical information.
"Information Builders assisted Moneris to empower our merchants to respond immediately to changing business conditions by consolidating and analysing data from multiple locations across multiple lines of business," said Jim Baumgartner, president of Moneris Solutions. "WebFOCUS has helped us streamline information, so our merchants can focus more time on their business and their customers."
The new Information Delivery Platform supports all hardware platforms and database types to provide access to and facilitate the delivery of information in any format to any type of user. Prior to this offering, organisations had to purchase multiple sets of tools and applications from multiple vendors to accomplish the same thing that can now be accomplished with just the WebFOCUS Information Delivery Platform.
The new Information Delivery Platform includes several product enhancements: User Administration Services (UAS) provides the integrated and highly scalable infrastructure for building secure, named-user environments that are appropriate for extranet and Internet information delivery systems. UAS provides multiple levels of security based on report content groups, database privileges, and an individual`s role in the enterprise.
Report Assistant is the first pure, thin-client ad hoc tool that enables users to access and build their own queries from any data source using nothing but a browser, so it can be easily extended to users outside the enterprise.
Developer Studio`s latest release provides one integrated development platform for building metadata, creating user groups and security, designing reports and knowledge maps (a unique method of report navigation), providing portal interfaces, and information scheduling and distribution.
New portal capabilities provide developers with a graphical design tool for organising information into a customised portal-like user interface that requires nothing more than a browser for access. This same interface allows users to personalize their information portal with content and reports that are integral to their job function. Users can subscribe to critical reports based on a schedule or database alert. Additionally, through our Open Portal Strategy, the business intelligence capabilities of WebFOCUS can be extended to the leading third-party portal products, including Microsoft SharePoint, IBM WebSphere, Plumtree, CA CleverPath, PeopleSoft, BEA, Oracle and Epicentric.
Web services support - using this emerging standard for cross-environment computing via the Internet, all WebFOCUS functionality can be exposed to many different sources, including search engines. Because WebFOCUS links Web services in UDDI registries to search engine usage, customers can utilise new distributed computing standards to improve speed and ease of critical information flow over intranets, extranets and the Internet.
"These products represent the final piece of a puzzle that was five years in the making," said Tony Cross, Marketing Manager of ICL`s business intelligence unit. "We believe this further solidifies our leadership in the information delivery platform space."
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Information Builders provides its customers with robust business intelligence solutions, specializing in real-time information delivery over the Web. Headquartered in New York, Information Builders helps companies and government organisations improve their mission-critical operations by transforming data into usable information and delivering it to employees, managers, partners, and customers through the Internet. With its award-winning WebFOCUS solution, Information Builders delivers information to more than 11 000 global customer sites, including most of the Fortune 100 and all US federal government agencies. The company employs 1 900 professionals worldwide and generated revenues exceeding $300 million in 2001.
ICL (South Africa) is the sole distributor of Information Builders in Southern Africa. For more information, visit www.informationbuilders.com or contact Tony Cross on (011) 233-5067 or tony.cross@iclafrica.com.
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