From 4GL to HTML5Liberating Business IntelligenceAcross the Enterprise

Information Builders was founded in 1975 by Gerald D. Cohen, Peter Mittelman, and Martin B. Slagowitz.

Their founding product was the database system called FOCUS.

Based in New York, New YorkBranches in • Atlanta, Georgia • Wakefield,Massachusetts• Schaumburg, Illinois• Cincinnati, Ohio• Plano and Houston, Texas• Denver, Colorado• Troy, Michigan• Arlington, Virginia• El Segundo and San Jose, California• St. Paul, Minnesota• Florham Park, New Jersey• Lake Mary, Florida• Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania• Scottsdale, Arizona• Seattle, Washington• Chesterfield,Missouri• Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Deliverssolutionstofinancial,government,healthcare, higher education, insurance, manufacturing, and telecommunications industries in the United States and internationally. Today, the company has a worldwide presence:

• 47salesoffices• 26 national distributors and agents. • More than 1600 employees worldwide • Revenue more than $315 million • Double digit growth in software license revenue

WebFOCUS offers true do-it-yourself reporting with unmatched scalability.

Performance Management Framework (PMF) is a solution that supports existing performance management methodology, such as Six Sigma and balanced scorecard (BSC).

The iWay Master Data Suiteisaunifiedtoolsetthatensuresconsistency, uniformity, and accuracy across all critical data assets.

Products

Information Builders’ Cloud Hosting Services has more than 10 data centers spanning every geographic region.

Fourth Generation Languages (4GL)

RAMIS,thefirst4GL,developedbyInformationBuilderscofoundersGerald D. Cohen and Peter Mittelman while working at Mathematica Products Group in 1970.

Information Builders was started by Cohen, Peter Mittelman and Martin Slagowitz. Cohen recreated the product he had built at Mathematica in the form of FOCUS which was released in 1975.

Theoriginal4GLinnovatorsflourishedduringthe1970sandearly1980s, but most fell victim to the personal computing revolution.

Under Cohen’s direction, FOCUS and Information Builders Continued expanding their product line.

Evolution of Programming Languages

1st generationmachine language

2nd generationassembly language

3rd generationhigh-level languages(C, C++, Java)

4th generationdomainspecificorhigh productivity languages(NOMAD, SQL, UNIX Shell)

5th generationartificialintelligence,neural networks.

FOCUS resembled other data access and analysis languages such as SQL and SAS, but also includes report and chart display and presentation features.

Featuredtheabilityfortheusertoconstructadatadescriptionfile(calleda“masterfiledescription”),ratherthanhavingthefilestructurehard-codedintotheprogram,eliminating need for data manipulation.

Structure allowed the user to be less familiar with the technical details of the data, and more familiar with the information contained in the data, blurring the line between user and programmer.

Double edged sword, allowing rapid answers to business or research questions; butalsocontributingtothepoorlywrittenand/ordifficulttomaintainsourcecode.

FOCUS

In1997,aweb-basedversionofFOCUSwasintroducedcalled“WebFOCUS”,visuallyoriented thin-client paradigm accessible from any web browser.

Web-based WebFocus delivers features normally associated with desktop software.

Rewrote charting engine to support HTML5

WebFOCUS Mobile Faves gives users the ability to deploy reports and dashboards to mobile devices.

Developed a 4GL translator that could automatically replace NOMAD programs with the WebFOCUS product. Similar translators for the other legacy 4GLs, such as RAMIS and FOCUS are in development.

WebFOCUS

HTML5 applications have advanced caching options that improve mobile device operation.

Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) allows developers to deliver rich and detailed data views.

Mobile Faves, a native application, or “helperapp,”interactswithWebFOCUSto manage and view content on iOS and Android mobile devices.

Exploits native gestures and designers benefitfromadeveloponce,deployanywhere strategy.

HTML5

“We pledge to help customers build systems that deliver the information needed by all of the people to make better decisions.”Gerry Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders.

HTML5 reporting dashboards allow developers to set up functionality, just by cutting and pasting widgets. The BI screens available can be selected or deselected by end-users based on their ways of working.

InfoAssist, a component of WebFocus 8, helps power users explore data, definemetricsandpublishinformationwithoutcoding.

Visual Discovery, with data mashup and discovery capabilities allow analyststolookatdatawithoutapredefinedschemaandfindrelationshipsthat may not have been apparent previously.

Magnify offers a search capability for both structured and unstructured data,whichhelpsusersfindbusinesscontentacrosstheenterprise.

WebFOCUS Active Technologies, a special type of web app that combines data, charting, and interactive analytic capabilities into a single web documentthatcanbee-mailedandsavedoffline.

Performance Management Framework (PMF), a suite of software making it easier to custom-ize dashboards, and support for third-party content to create dashboard mash-ups with Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities.

Certifiedkeyriskindicators(KRIs)togoalongwithexistingkeyperformanceindicators(KPIs).

PMF ships with a business model that contains more than 60 tables, and more than 400 pre-built metrics(called“gadgets”withinthePMFparadigm)thatdeployovertheWeb.

Customers can deploy on their choice of SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2 databases. The software also comes with extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, eliminating expense and complexity.

The pre-built metrics included in PMF, such as balanced scorecard or Six Sigma, allows users to link cause and effect, and measure results over time.

PMF

iWay Information Asset Management Platform uses a columnar database called Hyperstage running on commod-ity servers to handle big data integration and analytics. The latest release, iWay 7 is composed of three robust suites:

• iWay Integration Suite delivers pow-erful integration capabilities that enhance informationunificationandaccessibility.

• iWay Data Quality Suiteforprofiling,cleansing, and enriching information.

• iWay Master Data Suite enabling master data management across multiple domains and comprehensive views of core business entities.

iWay

Analytics applied to social media are changing how business gets done.

WebFocus 8 enables users to examine posts, blogs and other social data to detect patterns in customer opinions and receive a robust contextual experience with tag clouds, quantitative information around mentions and sentiment.

Information Builders has given its customers the capability to track social media properties like Twitter feeds from within PMF.

iWay has similar capabilities in CEP Enable, a complex event processing (CEP) tool that enables monitoring Facebook, Twitter Feeds, or Salesforce Chatter and responding with a WebFOCUS report or dashboard, sending e-mail, or generating an automated Twitter response.

Managers can interact with their iWay CEP Enable events in the same way that much of the social network lives: on mobile devices.

Social information alone has lim-ited value, but when married with internal metrics such as customer life-time value, it has much more impact.

The cloud promises agility and cost-effectiveness that traditional infrastruc-ture never could. As cloud solutions mature, every kind of company is moving to the cloud to eliminate capital expenditures, reduce risk, and more easily adopt big data, social media, and mobile computing solutions.

Information Builders’ Cloud Host-ing Services tap into this demand, enabling organizations to deploy the company’s innovative informa-tion management platform in either a shared virtual environment or through dedicated private resources.

The Cloud

Next-generation business intelligence benchmark research shows that usability is the most critical buying criterion for nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations.

Cohen’s efforts to free up data for all remains a focal point of Information Builders’ efforts to create a simple development environment that does not require a gatekeeping DBA, to share data beyond a small cadre of backroom professionals, but there remains much progress to be made.

Research the company undertook showed that the majority of companies regularly ask for feedback from executive management (82%), mid-level management (83%) and knowledge workers (70%). Companies less often ask about the preferences of operational/front-line employees (55%), customers (51%), external partners (41%) and suppliers (34%).

While it’s used every day as the lifeblood of commerce, data is suddenly at the center of headlines in the popular press. That doesn’t mean it will be shared more broadly, though -- unless companies, government institutions and the people who work for and interact with them make sharing it a priority.

The Future

Company Overview of Information Builders, Inc. Bloomberg Businessweek

Information Builders Inc. insideview.com/directory

Information Builders google.com/finance

Company Information Builders crunchbase.com

Company profile Information Builders hoovers.com

Tony Cosentino “Information Builders’ BI is Customer Driven” Information Management Blogs 20 Jun 2013

Jack Vaughan “Teams look to HTML5 for mobile BI development on varied devices”

searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com 27 Jun 2013

Vance McCarthy “WebFocus 8 Will Push Envelope for ‘Real-Time’ BI” idevnews.com

“Fourth generation programming language 4GL”techopedia.com

“Fourth generation languages” webopedia.com

Sources

David ManningBusiness Intelligence CIS 570Summer 2013