Roadmap: What's Ahead for WebFOCUS

By Dan Ortolani

Considerable developments have taken place in recent months throughout the business intelligence marketplace. Several corporate mergers and acquisitions have received much press and analyst coverage. However, the most significant development in the BI industry is a new realization by many large corporations that enterprise reporting is critical to their ability to manage their business and provide information to customers and partners.

Enterprise business intelligence solutions, by definition, require scalability, performance, and management capabilities beyond those found in lower-end departmental deployments. Therefore, engagement by IT organizations is required to ensure that corporations' BI applications and decisions are easily integrated with existing security integration and architecture (i.e., J2EE, .NET, etc.) standards.

The WebFOCUS Product Program, currently comprising both WebFOCUS Release 5.3 and an exciting major initiative code-named "Tango," contains a number of strategic projects that not only address these IT-driven requirements but also extend targeted new capabilities to the desktops of analysts, power users, developers and information consumers.

WebFOCUS Release 5.3

WebFOCUS Release 5.3, due out in production this summer, represents the next major feature upgrade to the Release 5 offering and contains substantial improvements in visual business intelligence, product usability, security support, and integration with customers' existing environments via Web services.

Visual business intelligence refers to the ability of users to analyze data via interactive charts. In addition, this category of enhancements speaks to the flexibility users are granted to visualize information utilizing a wide selection of high-quality chart types and controls that enable them to make decisions and spot trends in their data without having to review large, tabular reports. Release 5.3 addresses both of these areas. First, the new version of WebFOCUS Visual Discovery features a thin client solution for those sites that prefer a .NET architecture over the initial Active X offering. Visual Discovery enables visual analysis via interactive charts across very large datasets.

Also in the visual area, graph quality has been upgraded across the product line. The new graph engine includes a new graph format, Scalable Vector Graphs (SVG) for "boardroom quality" graphs as well as a number of new graph types. Developers, ad hoc power users, and consumers of graph output within PDF documents, will all realize the benefits of this high-quality output.

In addition, the default behavior for such actions as sizing and placement of labels, legends, and other graph objects is now smart and automatic, lessening the need for API coding techniques.

Product usability continues to be a priority for the program, and advancing this area to produce more intuitive, consistent user interfaces across tools is a key goal of Release 5.3. User Interface design audits have been conducted and completed for both ad hoc user tools (Graph, Report Assist, and Quick Query) as well as Developer Studio.

The ad hoc tools have been greatly simplified via the consolidation of dialogues and options. An important change in the technology used to create the tools (Cascading StyleSheets) allows for the customization of these tools.

With Release 5.3, customers can create themes or "skins" (colors, company logos, etc.) in the Business Intelligence Dashboard and have that customized look propagate to the ad hoc tools.

Developer Studio has undergone more than 100 changes targeted to provide a tool that is powerful and easy to navigate. These usability changes will enable developers to build and deploy applications faster, thus increasing productivity.

Security support is extended in Release 5.3 via the creation of a security plug-in designed to support single sign-on across many different security implementations. WebFOCUS can access authentication credentials from many third-party Web-based security products such as Tivoli, Entrust, and SiteMinder, as well as LDAP and RDBMS-based systems. WebFOCUS accepts this information and uses it to provide secure access to all of its components.

This simplifies administration and ensures that WebFOCUS applications adhere to established corporate security standards.

Web services are used increasingly by customers ahead of the emerging technology curve. At these sites, SQL procedures along with business rules and other logic, are encapsulated as Web services. The benefit is that these services can then be used by any application as components and accessed via a standard protocol (SOAP). As the next step in its ability to provide universal data access, WebFOCUS can now access these Web services as data sources.

This is known as the ability to "consume" a Web service. This means that developers can automatically generate standard WebFOCUS metadata based on the descriptive information contained in a Web service's WSDL (Web services Description Language) file, thus opening the ability to report from, join, and perform full reporting operations against that Web service.

This capability enables corporations with large investments in Web services (or components such as EJBs, which could be converted to Web services) to leverage these investments for reporting. In addition to the Web services consumer feature set, WebFOCUS reports can be published as Web services.

“Tango” Project Preview

The Tango project refers to a number of strategic development initiatives currently underway at our corporate headquarters in New York. The mission of the Tango task forces is to extend WebFOCUS' lead as the premier scalable BI reporting product for the enterprise, open new markets via extensions in the product offering, continue to enhance user interfaces, provide fully integrated architecture and configuration model, and to investigate areas where WebFOCUS and other technologies such as iWay, third-party products, and customer-developed solutions can potentially work in concert to create high-impact, high-leverage solutions.

Some Highlights

The next generation of WebFOCUS scalability is predictive, intelligent workload management. As other early-release BI reporting servers struggle to achieve even a modicum of scalability, the WebFOCUS Tango releases will extend WebFOCUS' already superior ability in this area.

The new Autonomic Server environment includes a zero-footprint, centralized console for deploying large numbers of WebFOCUS Reporting Servers. The system is administered by specifying key performance and service level targets including number of reports per minute, average response time and number of anticipated concurrent users. Once in operation, the system automatically adjusts to meet performance and scalability requirements based on the site's criteria.

The Web publishing market, in which corporations publish integrated documents to their customers via e-mail, is growing. In this market, users often simply see the output through a viewer such as the Acrobat reader, or they print it out. Tango has the potential to open major new uses for WebFOCUS in this business.

One example of this type of application is a credit card company distributing monthly statements to its corporate cardholders, complete with tabular, graph, and text information all positioned on specific locations on a page for viewing or printing. 401K statements and invoices are other examples of this type of pixel-perfect positioning.

To create these types of precision reports, extensions to the server environment (new DHTML format, PDF enhancements) as well as a new WYSIWYG Developer Studio Report Painter are required. A central mission of the Tango project is to deliver both. Development is well underway for these components and will be demonstrable shortly.

Tango will provide WebFOCUS access from any application, program or development tool. A consistent set of Java™ APIs for all product components (ReportCaster, Managed Reporting, WebFOCUS Servlet) make it easy for customer-written Java applications to access the WebFOCUS environment programmatically, allowing for seamless integration with a site's Java environment (container, sectary, etc.).

These programmatic interfaces also provide a gateway into third-party products that extend the scope of BI, such as document management.

For the developer, embedded WebFOCUS controls in either .NET or Java development environments present WebFOCUS in a way that is native to these environments and familiar to developers. In addition, Web services can be automatically generated for these environments, making WebFOCUS reports available to any application.

More information regarding Tango initiatives will be presented at Summit 2004 User Conference in May in New Orleans.