In the News
Gotta Have ROI? Get With the Program!
Information Builders' new Million Dollar ROI Program documents customers' success with operational business intelligence (BI) applications built with WebFOCUS. The program, developed to zero in on the many customers who have experienced savings in the millions as a direct result of their WebFOCUS applications, includes an ROI assessment from a team of independent, unbiased financial researchers, interviewers and facilitators who analyze the savings from a WebFOCUS application at no charge to the customer.
Take, for example, The Hillman Group, a $365-million manufacturer of key-making equipment and other small hardware components, who has implemented a highly scalable WebFOCUS enterprise BI and reporting solution that integrates with existing applications and resources to create one encompassing view of the enterprise. Now everyone from executives to frontline workers can leverage operational business intelligence (OBI) capabilities, which provide them with accurate business information that has drastically improved bottom-line results.
Lloyd's of London (see story in this issue) has reaped significant ROI, having leveraged Information Builders' WebFOCUS product to integrate seamlessly with the company's operating platform. Lloyd's reports heightened productivity yet a drop in operational costs.
La Petite Academy relies on the WebFOCUS enterprise BI platform exclusively, to consolidate various data sources and create a common set of reporting tools that any of its 650 academies and supporting staff nationwide can use – and anticipates saving lots of time and money, to boot.
Unlike traditional uses of BI apps, operational BI extends the high-quality, actionable business information that BI applications generate to many different types of employees throughout the enterprise, as well as to external partners and customers outside the walls of an organization.
For more information on Information Builders' Million Dollar ROI program, visit www.informationbuilders.com/applications/million.html.
Information Builders Expands European Operation – Demand for Operational Business Intelligence Fuels Market Growth in Europe
Information Builders has announced a series of investments in the company's European operations. These include a number of senior appointments and an expanded partner and channel program, designed to help Information Builders meet the growing demand for operational BI in Europe. This demand is being driven by European market trends such as business continuity, compliance and consolidation within customers' industry sectors. By investing heavily in Europe, Information Builders aims to be the number one choice for European organizations investing in business intelligence.
This expansion follows growing recognition among European businesses that Information Builders offers a better approach to business intelligence that extends beyond the 5 percent of users and 10 percent of data reached by traditional systems. This, together with its enhanced product portfolio, has already led to dozens of blue-chip organizations across Europe turning to Information Builders in the past six months. Among them: SMACL in France, Randstadt in Belgium, T-Systems in Germany, and Lloyd's of London and BT International in the UK.
Customers Leverage and Extend SAP Investment to Drive Business Performance
Information Builders has beefed up integration With SAP Business Information Warehouse, with enhancements to WebFOCUS for enterprise reporting, performance management and data integration in conjunction with SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW). Several customers, including Hillerich and Bradsby, Pharmascience, Saint-Gobain Weber, and Valero Energy have implemented WebFOCUS to quickly analyze and develop reports from the SAP BW solution to deliver high-quality, actionable business information to users throughout the enterprise.
WebFOCUS makes it easy to quickly analyze SAP BW data and generate reports without any prior knowledge of the data hierarchies. Allowing customers to fully leverage their software solutions from SAP and other vendors, Information Builders ensures that business users receive a consistent view of corporate performance information from a lightweight browser-based Web console, opening access to self-service applications.
WebFOCUS 7 Attains "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" Certification
So, what's in it for customers? This certification further proves that WebFOCUS can offer comprehensive, reliable reporting and analysis directly from inside the SAP NetWeaver platform. More importantly, it tells developers that they can seamlessly include information from other ERP systems and legacy and home-grown systems, as well as combine data from SAP solutions with other data in a single report. Drawing from all information assets and deploying to a large number of users is essential in today's advanced operational BI applications.
Best Practices for BI Program Expanded
The key principles for enterprise reporting success – rooted in 30 years of customer feedback and hands-on experience – can now be yours, thanks to Information Builders' enhanced best practices program, which includes a wide array of training, seminars and extensive reports detailing all aspects of implementing best practices to ensure the strategic utility of business intelligence.
Dedicated to ensuring that the true promise of strategic BI investments is fulfilled, Information Builders experts continually renew the standard approach to building and deploying enterprise business intelligence. Through the Best Practices program, Information Builders highlights key considerations and critical success factors for implementing business intelligence across an enterprise, exposing a variety of approaches, as well as the strengths, limitations, risks, and projected impact of each approach on the business and technical processes.
"We have reaped the benefits of Information Builders' extensive experience," said John Sheridan, director of Business Technology and Development at Administaff, the nation's leading professional employer organization serving as a full-service human resources department for small and medium-sized businesses throughout the U.S. "From day one of the implementation, Information Builders' insight on end-user training and overall architectural integration have enabled us to improve customer service by providing expanded, standardized reporting capabilities," he concluded.
Numero Uno
Spanish magazine DATA TI readers have recognized WebFOCUS as the best BI product of the year. The magazine's readers, mainly professionals and executives from the technology sector, chose WebFOCUS as it represents the most solid technology within the operational BI market and offers a much more innovative and advanced solution than its competitors. The results of the DATA TI poll were conclusive: 30.19 percent of the readers who voted considered WebFOCUS the best BI product launched launched last year. The other competitors in the BI category were MicroStrategy with 19.81 percent of the votes, Business Objects with 10.38 percent, Cognos with 3.77 percent, and SAS with 1.89 percent.
Mainframe FOCUS Still Going Strong in a WebFOCUS World
The mainframe FOCUS product continues to maintain a deeply embedded presence in most mainframe-centric corporations. Though FOCUS has traditionally followed an independent path of release numbering and content from WebFOCUS, future FOCUS releases will now coincide with WebFOCUS releases in terms of features, release timing and numbering sequence.
The WebFOCUS source code base is now used in all areas of FOCUS, where appropriate, so both products are now driven from the same underlying logic to create a seamless commonality of features, functionality and performance across all platforms. All new features of WebFOCUS that are applicable to mainframe processing will be equally available in FOCUS, with the ever-present quality effort and dedication to protect the stability of existing applications.
This alignment allows the mainframe FOCUS product to interact more fluidly with WebFOCUS via common output formats like PDF and HTML, as well as anticipated connections via ReportCaster for flexible mainframe report distribution and via Structured Hold Files for portable retention of data relationships as well as the data itself. Technical Support will also be more flexible, as technical specialists can overlap across products with problem resolutions applicable across the board.
The next release of mainframe FOCUS will also take advantage of the new IBM C compiler to derive an across-the-board performance improvement of roughly 20 percent over the previous 7.3 release. A benchmark white paper describing this exciting performance improvement will be released in the near future.
 
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