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Back to Basics – Information Builders Focuses on Stability and Utility
[Editor's note: The following review of WebFOCUS 5 by Ganesh Variar appeared in the June 17, 2003 issue of Intelligent Enterprise magazine.]
Business intelligence (BI) tool vendors have made giant strides over the past decade. But user consumption of BI tools hasn’t kept pace with sales, primarily because the products tend to be hard to deploy and difficult to use.
Several vendors have focused on providing new features that support the latest IT buzzwords at the expense of strengthening their basic reporting and analysis architecture. WebFOCUS 5 from Information Builders – one of the oldest companies in the BI industry – concentrates on getting the basics right. Released earlier this year, the latest incarnation of the 25-year-old FOCUS product combines its traditional strength in query and analysis with higher-end features such as financial reporting, Web services support, closed-loop BI, customized dashboards, and report bursting. WebFOCUS 5 also capably addresses enterprise-level challenges such as security, scalability, administration, customized application development, and timely data delivery.
Reporting and AnalysisBecause the WebFOCUS installation involves configuring several components, doing it yourself isn’t recommended. I found the GUI friendly and intuitive; users with little or no SQL knowledge should be able to navigate it and create reports fairly easily. True to its name, WebFOCUS is a completely Web-based solution. Users can access all reporting and analysis functions directly through a Web browser.
WebFOCUS supports multiple report formats (including HTML, PDF, and Excel) and offers a compound report feature that lets users combine several reports (with the same or varied layouts and formats) into a single one. Complex drill-downs are possible in all supported output formats. It’s also possible to set up reports that let users drill across other data sources. For example, from an internally generated sales report, a user could potentially click on a link next to a customer name and drill across to a Web site that displays the current value of that customer’s stocks. WebFOCUS supports on-demand paging and generates a table of contents to ease navigation of large reports. It can natively access more than 85 data sources ranging from legacy systems to proprietary cubes, and it supports canned, ad hoc, and online analytic processing (OLAP) reporting. The Dimension Builder incorporates OLAP functionality into any report without having to build a cube.
The financial reporting and analysis module that ships with WebFOCUS 5 includes a modeling tool for generating balance sheets, profit and loss analysis, income statements, and other financial reports. The module also includes several forecasting features and statistical functions. A set of analytic templates tailored for specific vertical industry segments (such as insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, and higher education) were created for standard business functions such as metrics deviations, trending, ranking, variance, dependency analysis, and business segmentation. WebFOCUS i-vision, an optional component in the WebFOCUS family of products, provides an interface to SAP data.
Information DeliveryReport distribution has been the Achilles’ heel of several BI systems. WebFOCUS compares well in this category. ReportCaster, the WebFOCUS report delivery engine, lets users distribute whole reports or just URLs via e-mail, fax, mobile devices, browsers, or printers. Users can request information through an e-mail template and have the response mailed back to them. Reports can be scheduled to run at specified intervals (daily, weekly, and so on) or in response to events. For example, a CFO might want to receive a copy of daily earnings reports when the earned amount goes above or below a certain threshold; in that case, the report delivery engine would send the CFO a notice and the report only when the appropriate conditions are met.
Another interesting distribution technology, called report bursting, involves running the report once and sending subsets of the report to appropriate parties. For example, you can set up WebFOCUS to run a nationwide sales report once a night and send the correct regional section of the report to the appropriate regional sales manager. Reports are also stored in a library where they can be versioned and categorized for easy access. The Business Intelligence Dashboard gives users personalized access to the analytic environment. Users can choose the type and format of every report they’d like to see on their dashboards. They can also incorporate analytic tools (such as ad hoc or OLAP query writers) into the interface. WebFOCUS provides a great interface to Excel; reports saved in Excel retain formatting and drill-downs to detail data via active hyperlinks in the spreadsheet. Users can also generate Excel PivotTables directly from a WebFOCUS report.
Enterprise-Level Features
The Reporting Server, often called just “WebFOCUS Server,” is the hub of the WebFOCUS architecture. It enhances scalability using built-in load balancing and multi-tiered processing that partitions application logic over multiple platforms. Its fail-over characteristics automatically reroute users to other servers if problems occur. WebFOCUS lets administrators easily monitor usage, assign user groups, define access rights, schedule report distribution, and set up event-driven alerts while providing data and report-level, role- and function-based security.
WebFOCUS Resource Governor detects and eliminates runaway queries before they hit the database. Resource Analyzer helps administrators analyze queries to identify potential bottlenecks and optimize their BI environments. A data update capability supports closed loop BI.
Leading BI tools include development environments that help organizations customize reporting solutions to meet their specific needs, and WebFOCUS is no exception. WebFOCUS Developer Studio is an integrated environment for developing Web-based reports and building Web applications that include business logic. Any WebFOCUS report can be published as a Web service that can be called from Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition or .NER environments. Developers can create a portal-like interface for WebFOCUS applications or incorporate reports into leading third-party portals such as Plumtree Corporate Portal, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, and IBM WebSphere Portal. To keep up with the current trend of providing the entire suite of BI applications, WebFOCUS has come up with its own extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, the WebFOCUS ETL Manager. However, if you’ve already invested in an ETL tool such as Informatica PowerCenter or Ascential DataStage, WebFOCUS provides adapters.
Pleasing Users and IT StaffThe BI market is huge and varied. Before buying a BI tool, most organizations create a shortlist of a few vendors then base their decisions on pricing and required functionality. (For a comprehensive methodology to compare and evaluate BI products, refer to the “Strategic Assessment Guide” listed in Resources). WebFOCUS should make it to your shortlist because it’s one of the leading tools in the market. Its no-frills approach empowers users, the true consumers of the product, while providing a stable platform that’s relatively painless for IT departments to support. With these strengths, WebFOCUS 5 has a good chance of being the last one standing.
Ganesh Variar (ganesh_variar@yahoo.com) is a lead analyst at Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon. He has nine years’ experience in managing and designing business intelligence solutions.
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