Business Intelligence in the Cloud

There are several crucial ways that cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) impacts business intelligence (BI) and analytics:

• Moving BI apps to the cloud can support operational innovation and reduce IT costs
• Providing analytics and BI apps to employees, partners, and customers via the cloud can help companies accelerate the delivery of business insight
• Integrating cloud-based external data resources – including unstructured input from social networks – enables companies to dramatically improve the sophistication of their decision-making and predictive capabilities
• Enriching data with other SaaS systems such as Salesforce.com provides a more holistic view of the customer and greater operational intelligence

Information Builders' solutions for business intelligence, integration, and data integrity are designed to enable our customers to take advantage of the cloud.

WebFOCUS in U.S. Bank's ScoreBoard Application

WebFOCUS in the Cloud

Information Builders provides enhanced cloud support services to help companies plan for a cloud implementation as well as to ensure 24/7 support of these applications. With scalability features like load balancing, failover, and the ability to start or stop servers on demand, users can enjoy all of the benefits of the cloud model without incurring high costs or expending significant resources. Our experts will assist your organization with any environmental concerns, such as speed, bandwidth, core recommendations, etc. Our cloud enablement services also include:

• Review of customer applications
• WebFOCUS installation and configuration
• Installation of incremental maintenance releases
• Quarterly status and planning meetings
• Environmental audit
• Performance tuning

We also work with enablement partners such as First Rate to deploy WebFOCUS in the cloud.

Security and Administration for Cloud and SaaS Implementations

WebFOCUS provides tougher security features to prevent hacking of critical cloud and SaaS implementations. It is also one of the only BI platforms to offer multi-tenancy, where a single instance of WebFOCUS on a server can serve multiple client organizations.

WebFOCUS also has both outbound and inbound support of RESTful web services. This means developers can make RESTful web service calls into an updated WebFOCUS API to embed its functions and FOCEXECs in their applications. Users will also be able to call RESTful web services to pull in external data and resources to enrich their applications (e.g., calling a Sentiment Analysis web service to rate the general sentiment of a customer service transaction).