Information Builders WebFOCUS
The Information Builders company was founded in 1975 and has grown consequently until it reached the position of one of the most interesting Business Intelligence solutions vendors. Furthermore, thank to WebFOCUS BI platform, Information Builders became also one of the leaders in the market. Focusing on four main aspects - Business Intelligence, Performance Management, data integrity, and advanced analytics - WebFOCUS is quite a good alternative to the BI suites offered by companies like SAP, IBM or Microsoft.
Released in the middle of 2010, 8th version of WebFOCUS platform brought significant changes, which - beside the four critical elements - consider also end user's point of view. Information Builders developers paid a lot of attention to personalization capabilities and platform's security.
Business Intelligence
Facilitating Business Intelligence usage, WebFOCUS is now focused mainly on delivering information which needs to be sufficient, consumable, and - at most - interactive. The tools responsible for ensuring that are then dashboards, portable analytics, and ad hoc reporting, easy to be accessed by people placed in different arms of company management hierarchy. WebFOCUS' Business Intelligence capabilities include also business activity monitoring and complex event processing, followed with easier and faster than earlier viewing and monitoring. The palette of functionalities is supplied with complex but intuitive reporting system.
Performance Management
Information Builders WebFOCUS platform's users praise the 8th release for improvement Performance Management capabilities - monitoring, driving, and tracking the performance is now possible thank to using collaboration tools, starter kits, metrics catalog, and well developed dashboard personalization function. As a result, users no longer have problems with sharing the goals and measuring the proceeding.
Data Integrity
No even the most efficient tools wouldn't work well together if not the data integration system able to make data from different sources agree. Data quality management and master data managements allow all WebFOCUS' users receive the most timely and accurate data they need. The platform is well prepared for cleansing, enriching, and merging and matching the data assets.
Advanced Analytics
With two new tools, WebFOCUS 8 platform is all users need for advanced analyzing. Visual Discovery - parlaying 64-bit architecture - is being used for analyzing even the largest volumes of data at once, allowing users to get to historical data and back in just a few seconds. As a result, they can quickly dive into each area of enterprise data they need. The other novelty is RStat - a tool responsible for embedding data from data sources into reports and dashboards.
Information Builders WebFOCUS resources
http://demoprod.
https://www-s7.its.unc.edu/doc/pdf/wf_intro52.pdf - an introduction to WebFOCUS, written by platform's developers. Even though it's dedicated to the 5th version of the solution, it includes all the detailed information needed to recognize the WebFOCUS. Each and every aspect of platform functionality is very well described there, so it's a guide suggested to anyone beginning his work with the already purchased platform or the ones who want to know it before actually deciding on purchase.
http://www.ebizq.net/news/12489.html - a relation dedicated to 8th release of Information Builders WebFOCUS focuses on all enhancements that were introduced to the newest version. In comparison to previous releases, the most meaningful features of the platform are once again described and explained. After all, it's quite a good guide for beginners trying to cover the wide range of WebFOCUS functionality.