WebFOCUS Advantage: A Complete Business Intelligence Solution

By Chris Banks

Everyone likes to be complimented. Maybe on a new tie, a suit, a hairstyle, or even on an enterprise business intelligence solution like WebFOCUS.

There are so many analysts, with so much information – Gartner, Meta Group, IDC and Giga just to name a few – and every business intelligence vendor looks forward to getting a compliment from these expert organizations. In August 2003, thanks to the strength of WebFOCUS 5, Gartner placed us in the Leaders quadrant for Enterprise BI Suites/Reporting for the first time. I heard from a good source that we remain in the Leaders Quadrant of their next version of Enterprise BI Suites/Reporting Magic Quadrant, due out this month.

Let's take a gander at Gartner's predictions for 2004. The research firm says that in 2004, there are five major areas of BI innovation:

	Advanced visualization and interpretation
	Business activity monitoring (BAM)
	Collaborative BI
	Scalability
	Web services

I smile when I see this list. Why? Because WebFOCUS does all of this today, and we are continuing to enhance these areas.

For “advanced visualization and interpretation,” we have WebFOCUS Visual Discovery, our advanced data visualization tool, purely integrated with our reporting solution. (See the WebFOCUS Newsletter December 2003 issue for an article on this, “Introducing WebFOCUS Visual Discovery.”)

For "business activity monitoring," WebFOCUS provides real-time, native access to more than 85 data sources over 35 different platforms, and most of the real-time access is read/write. So you can empower your users to not only identify problem areas, but resolve them as well.

For "collaborative BI," you may now append sticky notes to any of your WebFOCUS reports defined in Managed Reporting. Sticky notes contain archived information, such as detailed discussions about an item in a report. Stay tuned for additional collaboration features built within Report Library in an upcoming version of WebFOCUS.

For "scalability," WebFOCUS is second to none, offering three-way scalability: the most concurrent users, most concurrent applications, and most different types of users. Be sure to read the Ventana Research TCO study (a copy is available at www.informationbuilders.com/new/Analyst_Reports.html), which concluded that Information Builders is the lowest-cost vendor for the largest category of business intelligence – parameterized and user-defined reporting.

For "Web services," WebFOCUS is the only business intelligence solution that can consume Web services information and incorporate it as a data source, as well as be called to present data as a Web service. (See the September 2003 WebFOCUS Newsletter issue for Efrem Litwin's article, "WebFOCUS Web services: How They Work.")

Lastly, Gartner just published its EBIS and Robust-Reporting Convergence Chart, and Information Builders was again listed among the top three leaders. So if you're finally thinking it's time to choose a single product to meet all of your enterprise business intelligence needs, look no further than WebFOCUS, the standard for enterprise business intelligence.