At Deadline

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Bolstering Homeland Security: It Takes a Team

Information Builders and Northrop Grumman Information Technology – a premier provider of advanced IT solutions, engineering, and business services for government and commercial clients – will work in unison to identify and pursue new business opportunities for three specific national security-related activities: bioterrorism/syndromic analysis, identification and authentication solutions, and law enforcement data integration.

The bioterrorism/syndromic analysis solution, which helps federal, state and local agencies share data and deliver bioterrorism warnings to the public, provides transformation capabilities, templates for data collection and delivery, and adapters for the rapid deployment of bioterrorism response systems. Northrop Grumman IT, Information Builders, and Visual Risk Technologies are currently implementing this solution for Delaware, while also pursuing work at other federal, state, and local government agencies as well as large private sector employers. The authentication and identification solution will allow employers to track every facet of an employee's movement and activity via smart card technology. The cards will also contain key biometric information so secure facilities remain truly secure.

Leisure Pursuits: Bourne for BI

Bourne Leisure is yet another example of how corporations are leveraging data across the organization to drive business performance. One of Britain's leading leisure companies with well-known brands including Butlins, Haven, British Holidays, and Warner, Bourne Leisure has set its sights on Information Builders' Web-based reporting solution as a way to bring management and sales reports to users via the company's intranet – and gain a real-time view of the enterprise.

Thanks to WebFOCUS, more than 400 employees – from account clerks to directors – at 60 UK locations enjoy open access to real-time business information such as sales ledger, stock control, sales margin and debtors reports. The WebFOCUS reports access data from Bourne Leisure's financial, sales, and reservation databases running on Microsoft SQL servers and are managed and maintained in-house by trained staff rather than costly contractors.

Mark Humble, Financial Reporting Systems Development manager at Bourne Leisure, said, "We chose Information Builders because it offered all-around functionality, and it was clear that the benefits of implementing the system would quickly justify the costs. Having successfully implemented the system for financial and management reporting, we're now looking to incorporate HR and use WebFOCUS to manage reports on staff training needs throughout the company."

ETL Manager Is Transformed, Better Than Ever

iWay Software's extract, transform and load (ETL) tool just got an "extreme makeover." Release 5.5 marks the end of a careful redesign process that included significant improvements to virtually every aspect of the product.

Auditing capabilities now include a real-time collection of information about ETL tasks on different platforms and their display in a Web console. Administrators can see up-to-the-second ETL-task status and problem areas from a single Web page. Also, there are noticeable improvements in tracing and reproduction facilities…not to mention a graphical user interface (GUI), perhaps the most recent and visible result of the redesign effort.

Performance enhancements are evident at every level of the product, from adapters to the main ETL Manager server. ETL Manager now makes it easy to create "source transformations" – transformations that occur on host platforms before any data gets moved to the central ETL Manager server.

"This new release represents a significant advance in our bulk data integration capabilities," said John Senor, president of iWay Software. "It was important for our 800 customers to move through the rearchitecting without losing their investments in ETL processing. Even with a major server revision in 5.2 and client and server changes in 5.5, our customers have been able to move smoothly along with us and reap significant benefits in the process."