As we've mentioned before, business intelligence (BI) systems face new challenges as they "grow up." As BI becomes operational, it serves larger cross sections of the enterprise. With demand in some cases reaching tens of thousands of users, loads easily tax servers and system administrator resources.

Yet, most BI products on the market today were never designed for such widescale enterprise use. Typically, scaling traditional departmental BI products required significant guesswork and luck. And as IT organizations grow leaner, they lack the time to tackle the aggravation of stretching departmental systems across the enterprise.

Listening to you, our users, we designed WebFOCUS 7 to become your enterprise standard. Many of you told us that managing a diverse collection of different BI systems was becoming a burden on your IT organizations and that it was time to rationalize. You needed a system that could scale to become your enterprise standard, while offering low cost of ownership.

We realized that the only way to answer your needs was a renewed focus on underlying architecture.

Consequently, we started by adding capacity-planning tools because meeting high demand requires careful planning and testing. With WebFOCUS 7's capacity-planning tools, you can simulate potential loads based on different response-time goals without the need for purchasing expensive third-party load-testing tools. As you plan capacity, WebFOCUS 7 accounts for different priorities and service levels that your organization grants to different classes of end users.

And we designed WebFOCUS 7 to manage itself once you have deployed it. Thanks to new autonomic capabilities, WebFOCUS 7 can mobilize the necessary server resources and balance loads without the need for human intervention whenever demand ramps up.

As with any enterprise system, security is a central concern. Documenting access control is becoming an important cornerstone of IT and corporate governance and compliance efforts. WebFOCUS 7 leverages the security investments that you have already made, thanks to integration with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directories. LDAP is a software protocol standard supported by most major vendors for enabling anyone to locate organizations, individuals, and other resources such as files and devices in a network, whether on the public Internet or on a corporate intranet.

With this new feature, WebFOCUS 7 fits seamlessly into single-signon systems that organizations are implementing.

And, as we mentioned last month, architecting BI systems to become your enterprise standard means that data integration cannot be an afterthought. Taking a best-of-breed approach for mapping, aggregating, and synchronizing data from multiple sources invites wasted effort, as the same problems are solved from scratch with each new BI project. To deliver low cost of ownership, your enterprise BI tool must also provide a robust, scalable integration engine that can prevent duplication of effort. WebFOCUS 7 delivers a consistent integration engine, embedding iWay technology under the hood. And with support to read and create Web services, WebFOCUS 7 supports the service-oriented architectures that many of you are now implementing.

WebFOCUS customers are already seeing results from our new enterprise-ready architecture. For instance, one customer is about to expand a BI system from 12,000 to 60,000 end users without buying additional tools. Such growth would not be possible without capabilities such as autonomic self-management, LDAP directory support, embedded data integration, and robust capacity planning – all of which WebFOCUS 7 has to offer.

Although by now it might sound clichéd, more and more companies are finding that they really are in the information business. For instance, RBC Royal Bank of Canada, which attained an astounding four-digit ROI using Information Builders technology to automate the reporting of old bank account records to conform with a new Canadian regulation, found that the information it retrieved with the new system also performed a valuable risk-management service. With the automated reporting system replacing microfiche, data for uncovering potential fraud became far more accessible, enabling the bank to make smarter decisions for granting credit.

In this case, the primary business is financial services. In your company, it may be something else, such as selling or distributing products, or delivering services to taxpayers. Chances are, in your organization, the ability to slice and dice information in new ways may prove vital to survival – regardless of whether your company is a private corporation or part of government. For RBC Royal Bank, adding new capabilities for viewing data crucial to granting credit became critical to the core business. Chances are, in your organization, the same is true.

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine. To provide feedback go to www.informationbuilders.com/insightstalkback

If you received this message in error, or wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please send a blank e-mail to stopinsights@informationbuilders.com.

Information Builders, Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121