Progress launches EasyAsk to simplify application data access

Organisations that make their application data available to non-technical users accelerate the adoption rate of their applications, lower their user support costs and improve overall user satisfaction.

More importantly, they provide timely information to business users that drive effective business decisions.

However, few business people have a way to easily access the timely, accurate information about products, customers, partners or business performance.

This requirement is about to be addressed through the local launch of EasyAsk by Progress Software South Africa, says Kerry Evans, sales director at Progress.

"EasyAsk brings the same ease of use to business intelligence that users have come to expect from Google," says Evans. "It allows users to interrogate their applications' data sets by using ordinary English sentences, and without their having any knowledge of the structure of the underlying data."

Similar offerings have tended to compromise on speed and performance, but EasyAsk has struck a balance between ease of use, high performance and scalability.

"Every executive is familiar with the Google interface," says Evans, "which means EasyAsk requires virtually no training, as it uses a similar interface. It is targeted at report-intensive high-end users, along with people who have outgrown OLAP cubes. This takes the pressure off IT in terms of production of reports."

Progress research has shown that 90% of the information end-users need to make operational/day-to-day business decisions is locked inside the repositories of enterprise and departmental business applications.

Unfortunately, the principal gateway into this information has traditionally been through search, query and reporting solutions deployed by IT.

"However, search is ineffective against enterprise data applications and does not always answer the question," notes Evans. "Rather, a long list of keyword matches is returned, forcing the user to search manually for the answer to their question. Further, most users do not know how to use contemporary technical query languages or report writers. These solutions are useful only for IT professionals and, as such, they create user frustration and a backlog of unmet reports at a time when IT budgets and capacity are shrinking. Therefore, users return to IT for help and wait and wait ... and wait. In the end, IT becomes the primary user of the very solutions expected to help business users. Therefore, the quest for timely business data remains unfulfilled.

"EasyAsk elegantly addresses all of these challenges," says Evans, adding that Progress's application partners are "very excited about the addition of EasyAsk to their solutions portfolio, as it provides them and their customers with easy access into their applications. We anticipate several of our partners adopting EasyAsk in the next few months."

"The latest version of EasyAsk pulls together both content and data from scattered locations across the enterprise so that users from any business unit can get a complete picture of what is going on within their customer relationships, their e-mail, their e-commerce or their internal processes," says Sue Feldman, VP of Content Technologies Research at IDC.

EasyAsk customers include Dutch book giant BGN, Ann Taylor, Blair, Broder, HPshopping.com, Kaman, Sony, BASF, Forbes.com, GlaxoSmithKline, the US Army, Siemens, Apprise Software and Gensource.