webfocus product roadmap - tech...

by Kevin Quinn

WebFOCUS Product RoadmapWhere We’re Headed Through 2008

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Business Intelligence 2.0

R&D Plans

The Emergence of Convergence

Overview of the WebFOCUS BI Platform

Foundation Technology

Integration Engine

Business Intelligence Engine

Peripheral Technologies

Development Tools

Roadmap Overview

Reduce BI Complexity

Enhance Event-Driven Processing

Promote BI for SOA

Support Mobile Information Workers

Enable Action via Reaction and Automation

Create Solution Frameworks

Leverage More Data Assets

Summary

Reach

Simplicity

Timeliness

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Table of Contents

Do you believe that the benefits of business intelligence (BI) should be limited to a few savvyanalysts in the back office? We doubt it. Like you, we assume that timely, contextually significantinformation can be a benefit to every person, activity, and process in – and beyond – the walls ofyour enterprise.

Industry pundits have termed this vision “pervasive BI,” since intelligence will be availableeverywhere. That’s in line with what Information Builders has worked toward for years. In each newversion of our business intelligence platform we have improved scalability and ease of use,reaching more and more users. Going forward, we plan to broaden our deployment methods andembrace new users and emerging mediums so everyone can benefit from BI – regardless of theirlocation or skill level.

Too often BI is closely tied to staged data residing in the data warehouse. To make an impact oncurrent operations and truly affect the bottom line, information needs to be delivered at the speedof business in concert with business events. Whatever term you employ – real time, near-real time,or right time – what is critical is the delivery of information on an event-driven basis.

The value of business intelligence also increases by bridging the gap between decision and action.In many solutions, the BI tool's responsibility ends with the delivery of information to the user. Theuser must then make a decision and initiate an action, such as sending an e-mail, calling a meeting,or making a phone call. In some cases both the decision and action can be automated. In othercases a report will enable a person to make the decision since the information delivered will carrywith it the appropriate business response.

Information delivered in this fashion can reduce process bottlenecks, accelerate or automatebusiness operations, and improve productivity. While this BI vision has significant merits, manybarriers, both real and perceived, have contained it to a limited space and inhibited its growthbeyond the back office. Information Builders removes these barriers.

1 Information Builders

Business Intelligence 2.0

2 WebFOCUS Product Roadmap

With the release of WebFOCUS 7 in 2005 Information Builders became the first vendor to offer ascalable Web-based BI platform that could support production-level BI applications. The proof of itssuccess is in the myriad applications with more than 100,000 users in operation today. But we donot intend to rest on these laurels. The following themes – integral to our 24 month product-development plans for WebFOCUS – allow us to break down the barriers to pervasive BI andbetween decision and action. Development plans to attain these goals are underway.

n Reduce BI complexity. To bring BI to broader audiences, including non-technical business users,we will continue to embrace and enhance widely accepted paradigms, such as the use of Webbrowsers and search engines. We will also leverage the latest trends and technologies in richInternet application (RIA) development, including AJAX and FLEX/FLASH, which will give usersand developers a more robust visual experience.

n Enhance event-driven processing. WebFOCUS has always extended “beyond the datawarehouse” and included access to more real-time and near-real-time sources like operationalapplications, transactions systems, and Web services. Going forward, it will be further enhancedwith event-monitoring and process-driven capabilities, enabling BI to be created and deliveredas business occurs. Other vendors’ solutions require tools to be bound at the hip to the datawarehouse. Yet, by their nature, most data warehouses are many steps removed from real-time.

n Promote BI for service-oriented architecture (SOA). BI largely remains an add-on componentto individual applications and lacks interoperability and true service orientation, which allow it tobe more fluid and encourages reuse. We plan to leverage the rapid service composition of ourintegration engine to create reusable BI components and composite applications. This willsimplify and accelerate development and promote wider adoption of BI as its benefits appear inevery newly developed application and business process.

n Embrace mobile information workers. Traditionally, business intelligence has been tied todesktop or laptop computers and paper reports with little or no access available to the mobileworker without a computer and physical Internet connection. Information Builders plans toenhance our capabilities for mobile workers who often find themselves with nothing more thana phone and access to e-mail.

n Enable action via reaction and automation. Today there is a gap between decision and action.BI tools provide the information but not the means to react. This gap slows decision-making andimpedes business processes. We will embed the means for users to make decisions in thedelivered information and provide the ability to automate decision-making when it is possible.

R&D Plans

Information Builders3

n Create solution frameworks. Organizations often have to decide between buying a packagedapplication and building a custom application. Purchased applications can be quick to get upand running, but include inherent growing pains discovered as organizations adjust processesand train users. Custom-built tools can take a long time to implement, but result in anapplication tailored to businesses’ needs. We resolve this dichotomy with solution frameworks,which take advantage of the benefits of each choice. Solution frameworks contain templates andmodels but are meant to be customized to meet requirements. Combined with ProfessionalServices’ expertise, the resulting solution is up and running quickly yet is tailored to uniquebusiness needs. We will continue to supply targeted, prepackaged solution frameworks andservices to accelerate delivery of high value, low-cost applications.

n Leverage more data assets. When it comes to data access and integration, no other existing BIplatforms have the breadth or depth of access of WebFOCUS. We want to maintain that lead andcontinue to provide our customers with the ability to tap into every potential source ofinformation. This is a never-ending process since new sources of data crop up every year.

The Emergence of ConvergenceMultiple technologies are beginning to come together as one. Reporting and querying are oftendiscussed as business intelligence; information access, preparation, and management are oftenconsidered enterprise information management (EIM); and information delivery and managementat the process level are often referred to as business process management (BPM). As InformationBuilders continues to develop WebFOCUS you will see features from BI, EIM, and BPM merge into asingle platform. This platform will simplify the work involved in orchestrating the flow ofinformation to people and processes.

A significant milestone in our roadmap will be the re-joining of our core technologies: iWaySoftware’s integration and service orientation and WebFOCUS’ business intelligence. Our ability toconnect to every known data asset – whether it lives in a database, application, or transaction –and our ability to listen for and monitor technology events that follow the flow of business within acompany gives us a unique position in the business intelligence marketplace.

The WebFOCUS platform has a simple function: to allow companies to leverage all of their dataassets, including databases, applications, messages, files, and documents to make their systems,people, and processes more efficient.

WebFOCUS has three major infrastructure components as part of the single underlying platform: n Foundation technology, which includes the optimized data, application, transaction and

document adapters, and the universal metadata to describe the underlying data in business terms

n Integration engine, which leverages the foundation technology to monitor events that occurwithin the enterprise; it then transforms associated data or messages for delivery to another datasource, application, or process

n Business intelligence engine, also known as the BI engine, which allows the data to bemanipulated and formatted for delivery to users as reports, alerts, or dashboards – in any output format

Overview of how WebFOCUS fits into an organization’s IT architecture.

Overview of the WebFOCUS BI Platform

WebFOCUS Product Roadmap4

WebFOCUS' BI and integration engines work with the metadata layer and adapters.

Considering the amount of data sources and the myriad of delivery formats, the simplicity with whicha developer can create BI applications and orchestrate real-time processes using WebFOCUS makes itinvaluable to organizations. Peel away the skin, there are some complex technologies at work.

Foundation TechnologyWebFOCUS’ foundation technology includes:n Adapters. A key part of WebFOCUS technology, there are over 300 adapters that provide the

ability to look at any data source through a common metadata layer. This makes everything looklike a simple relational table regardless of its underlying access method, such as BAPI for SAP, SQLfor RDBMS, and MBF for JD Edwards. Adapters are optimized to take advantage of the nativecapabilities of each individual data source.

n Metadata. WebFOCUS uses a common metadata layer – the technology that shields the userfrom data complexities and presents the information in business terms – across all integration,ETL, reporting, and analysis functions. WebFOCUS metadata not only describes the relationshipbetween items whether or not they reside in the same DB, it can also describe cross-platformand cross-database relationships.

Integration EngineThe WebFOCUS integration engine includes:n Event monitors. Used to “listen” for activity on a channel or bus, event monitors (sometimes

called listeners) seek and identify transactions or technology events that require action by aperson or another part of a process.


n Transforms any message type, leveraging any transport protocol into any other message type using any other transport protocol. It does this to simplify integration between disparate resources.

Business Intelligence EngineThe BI engine is similar in function to a transformer but, instead of manipulating data for transportto another part of a process or another data source, its intent is to join, aggregate, manipulate, andformat the data for eventual delivery as a report or dashboard to a person.

The BI engine in WebFOCUS is a straightforward platform, managing the flow of information in anenterprise. Don’t think of it as just another BI platform; it does a whole lot more. WebFOCUS is acomplete information infrastructure that is hardware, data, file, and application independent. Itprovides the ability to create information systems that become part of your productionenvironment. And, because everything created in this environment can be manifest as a Webservice, it becomes a key foundation technology for service-oriented architecture initiatives.

Peripheral TechnologiesSurrounding the WebFOCUS platform, key tools and peripheral technologies allow organizations toleverage, deliver, and present the underlying information in several ways. They are:n Scheduler. This tool provides the ability to setup time-based or event-based delivery schedules.

The schedules can govern the delivery of reports and alerts that are sent to people or messagesthat are sent as part of a process.

Scheduler, portal, and service composition tools support the WebFOCUS platform as peripheral technologies.


n BI portal. This tool allows you to organize a single, Web-based, interface for all BI contentinformation such as reports, charts, dashboards, and search capabilities. Portals make finding andaccessing content easy for end users.

n Service composition. This allows you to turn any transformation or combination oftransformations into a service for use and reuse by developers. Service composition significantlyaccelerates development by reducing the amount of code that needs to be written to performintegration in complex environments.

DataMigrator, Developer Studio, and Service Manager bolster the WebFOCUS platform by serving aspowerful development tools.

Development ToolsThe WebFOCUS BI platform is supplemented with the following development tools.n DataMigrator. An extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, DataMigrator allows organizations to

graphically design a data warehouse. The tool uses a common metadata layer to access theadapters and transform data from one or more sources into data that is loaded into the data warehouse.

n Developer Studio. A complete business intelligence development environment, DeveloperStudio provides a single place to develop metadata, reports, parameter forms, and dashboards. Italso serves as the administration tool for designing and securing access to the portal.

n Service Manager. On a basic level Service Manager allows organizations to control theplatform’s underlying technologies – including listeners, adapters, transformers, and the BI engine– to create services. With it, several fine-grained services can be combined into a single coarse-grained service for reuse by other developers and applications. It also provides a graphical designtool to create process flows that utilizes the underlying services, surrounding them with businesslogic, creating smart processes.


Data Applications

Systems People Processes

Messages Files and Documents

Services

BusinessIntelligenceEngine

IntegrationEngine

Metadata

Adapter

Our goal is to provide organizations with a platform to rapidly design business intelligenceapplications and intelligent processes. These processes and applications can then be leveraged atthe component level or as a service-oriented architecture and enable the free flow of informationto accelerate business decisions and subsequent actions. Plans for the development of theWebFOCUS business intelligence platform over the next 24 months support this goal.

Outline of the WebFOCUS roadmap through 2008.

Reduce BI ComplexityOne of the biggest inhibitors to the adoption of business intelligence is that access is generallyreserved for the technically savvy. Non-technical users and users with little time on their handsoften find themselves starved for information. This is something that we have worked hard toovercome with features such as:n Guided ad hoc technology to quickly design simple forms that provide non-technical users

with self-service access to information with little or no training.

n WebFOCUS Magnify, a search solution that combines the simplicity of search with the insightof business intelligence.

n WebFOCUS Active Reports, a simple, thin format for delivery of data bound to BI functionalityin a single document, made BI more accessible and portable. Users without Internet access cannow interact with their reports.

The following additional technologies planned for the next 24 months will further simplify theaccess and use of business intelligence for non-technical users.

Roadmap Overview


Magnify for Lucene (Open Source Search Engine)WebFOCUS Magnify leveraged our listener technology to monitor transactions as they enter anorganization. We then enrich and transform the message into an HTML page that can be passed offand indexed by the Google Search Appliance (GSA). Subsequent searches end with search results that include normal unstructured content mixed-in with transactions or structured content foundin the documents created. Each of these returned documents is further enhanced and categorizedthrough our use of the database metadata. The individual transactions are then linked to real-timereports, which tell more about the targeted item. The result is an elegant merging of search and BIthat allows the user to enter the environment from the search interface – the first transactionalsearch technology.

WebFOCUS Magnify enables users to search both structured and unstructured BI content and returnscontextually meaningful results.

The initial release of Magnify in early 2007 was limited to use with the Google Search Appliance (GSA).To make this technology more accessible to our customers we are enabling it for the Lucene opensource search engine. In this way the indexing, search, and BI functionality is available from onesource at a very low cost. We expect that this will drive much greater adoption of the technology.

In the second quarter of next year we will expand the search technology beyond transactions tometadata, procedures, and the WebFOCUS Report Library. This will allow the search context toappear throughout the WebFOCUS environement further simplifying end-user navigation.

This enhancement drives initiatives on the roadmap: simplifying BI so that it can be leveraged bynon-technical frontline workers and provide greater access to right-time information.


Active Technologies: Active Dashboards, Collaboration, and SecurityWebFOCUS Active Reports, introduced in 2006, leverages Web 2.0 technologies to provide deliveryof self-contained BI documents in which all data and BI functionality were bound into a singledocument. Users can easily interact with the document without requiring software, a softwarelicense, or even an Internet connection.

This technology further simplified access to BI functionality and broadened the distributionnetwork to include mobile workers and users who find themselves with Internet connections onlyperiodically and are often forced to work in disconnected mode.

We are continuing to enhance this technology and recently announced support for ActiveDashboards, which allow combinations of multiple, interactive reports and charts on tabbeddashboard interface. Personalized books of BI can now be delivered to individual users regardless oftheir location at a very low cost and without overloading your network.

Active Dashboards enable organizations to deliver personalized books to users without placing astrain on network resources.

In the next WebFOCUS release collaboration and security features will be introduced that allowusers to better work as a group even though they may find themselves on the move.

From a collaboration perspective, an annotation feature will be added to Active Reports so thatindividual users will be able to comment on cells or components of the report or dashboard andforward the resulting new document on to co-workers for additional comment. Extended securityfeatures will include password encrypted Active Reports and Dashboards that have expiration datesto ensure the proper use and distribution of up-to-date, relevant information.

In early 2008 we will add some special caching algorithms that will allow “occasionally” connectedusers to work with large amounts of data via Active Technologies. A large payload of “in-memory”data will be held on the WebFOCUS server. Small chunks of that data will be delivered to thedesktop as requested or as needed. The user can terminate the connected session at any time oncethey have created the necessary filtered data set. This will allow Active Reports to handle moreanalysis with larger data sets.


Info AssistantTo make report development more business friendly we are spending huge amounts of resourcescreating a tool that simplifies and combines the ad hoc query and report layout capabilities into asingle tool. This tool is being created using AJAX technologies so that it can have the rich visualinterface that people expect from Windows applications, but it will be deployed in a pure thin-client fashion.

Info Assistant will combine wizard and layout functionality into a thin interface that looks like anOffice 2007 product without any desktop footprint. The product will promote user adoption givenusers’ pre-existing comfort level. Yet it will have the ease of management expected from a pureWeb-based tool.

Info Assistant’s Office-like interface promotes adoption while its thin-client architecture means it’seasy to manage.

Enhance Event-Driven ProcessingHistorically, many vendors have described the database record as the building block of BI. The truthis that the database record is not the foundation for BI, the message is. Before data is everaccumulated into a database record it is generated as an electronic message in the processes thatrun an organization. Real-time alerts allow organizations to monitor business events as they occurand notify appropriate staff to take action. This feature made WebFOCUS the only BI product withtrue real-time alerting functionality.

Information Builders plans to continue development of features and functions that allow ourcustomers to reach into more real-time data by monitoring and reacting to information that lives inthe messages that run business processes. Our roadmap for integration includes:n Major enhancements to our ETL tool, DataMigrator, to more easily manage the creation of real-

time data warehouses

n Continued commitment to monitor, enrich, and transform real-time message content intoinformation that can be immediately routed to people and/or processes to expedite business decisions


n Development of a secure message exchange that will guarantee the delivery of messages acrossbusinesses regardless of their underlying technology, firewall, or platform

DataMigrator to Evolve Into Real-Time Data ManagerInformation Builders will continue to enhance its capability in the real-time space by introducingData Manager, a completely new and redesigned product to replace DataMigrator. Data Managerwill have capabilities that allow for the creation of trickle-feed data warehouses, giving analysts andmanagers the ability to work with right-time data. Decisions made at this level of an organizationcan be made within minutes of a business event and will no longer take days, weeks, or months toaffect business.

Data Manager will include features for trickle-feeding the warehouse one transaction at a time aswell as bulk loads and parallelization of the load process. This is an advantage since more than onechannel can load the warehouse at a time. It will also include the ability to split larger messagesinto parts to improve performance. Data Manager will have a new process-like interface based on Service Manager and it will support the loading of star-schemas, cubes, relational, and flat-filedata sources.

Process-Driven BI and Secure Message ExchangeIn 2006 Information Builders introduced the concept of process-driven, or event-driven, BI with thedevelopment of business intelligence objects as part of the Service Manager workbench. Theseobjects allowed us to branch to BI procedures that could generate and deliver reports based on anevent. We were also able to read the output of a report directly during a process and automaticallyreact to the interpretation of that event.

Process-driven BI remains an important component of our strategy as we continually addfunctionality to key components of Service Manager.

One major enhancement, Secure Message Exchange (SME), will allow partners to exchange criticalinformation more easily. As business intelligence expands out of the back office to the frontlines,some of the most obvious areas for process improvement occur in the exchange of informationwith partners. Always a challenge when sharing information with partners is the fact that they maybe using different technologies to transport information. In most cases the different systems willnot exchange information easily in a secure guaranteed way. SME guarantees the transport ofmessages across disparate messaging platforms using industry standard Internet technology.

Promote BI for SOAPart of Information Builders’ vision is to embed intelligence into every process and application. Forthis to occur, easy participation in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is necessary. Several years


ago we enabled much of our managed reporting and ReportCaster functionality to be callable as aWeb service. The WebFOCUS Web services enablement option also provided the ability to turn anyparameter-driven report into a Web service. With the re-joining of our core technologies weimmediately enable WebFOCUS components to participate in a SOA.

Service Manager for WebFOCUSThe iWay Service Manager now links directly into WebFOCUS components, namely the WebFOCUSReporting Server and ReportCaster scheduling engine. Composite services and applications can bebound together in Service Manger. This allows organizations to create complex BI services andintelligent processes that use and reuse WebFOCUS services.

Service Manager links directly into the WebFOCUS Reporting Server and ReportCaster.

Mobile Information WorkersAs workforces become more widespread and remote the way to keep in touch with businessactivities is through mobile phones. Most new phones are really information appliances with e-mail, text messages, and Internet access. Though BI has been absent from most mobile phones, weintend to end this by enabling much of our technology for these phones. We already tweakedActive Reports so that they can be delivered and viewed and analyzed on a mobile phone.

Mobile FavoritesA feature called Mobile Favorites will be added to an upcoming release of WebFOCUS, allowingusers to mark online content to be available on their mobile device. This means parameter-drivenreports and content of any format, such as Excel, PDF, or Active Reports, can be run and accessedfrom a phone. Even reports that require parameter input like those from our guided ad hoctechnology will be accessible.


WebFOCUS Product Roadmap

Enable Action via Reaction and AutomationBefore the term business intelligence became popular, tools in the BI category were often referredto as decision support tools, because the content of a query or report held the facts that influenceda decision-maker to take an action. Much of the potential of business intelligence lies in the abilityto shrink the gap between decision and action.

There are at least two things to help bridge this gap: process-driven business intelligence, asdescribed previously and making decisions and actions an automated process. This can happenwhen the action is well defined. For example, a credit check for a potential mortgagee with anexcellent score results in immediate approval without any direct interaction with an agent. Otherscores may take more thought by a person before the decision to lend money is made. Becausemany decisions require user thought and input WebFOCUS links a report directly to a user-inputform, streamling the decision/action process.

If a user determined from viewing an inventory report that more supplies were needed WebFOCUSlinks that report to a form that will initiate a purchase order and trigger an EDI transaction to asupplier. If a staffing manager at a hospital reviewed a report of current and expected patient loadsand decided more nurses were needed for the next 48 hours, the report could link to a form thatnotifies staff on call.

Business is filled with many of these types of decision/action scenarios. Few BI platforms enablethem to occur. Information Builders is in a unique position to do just this. Most of our adapters haveread/write capabilities so they can update or input data as well as report. Our applicationdevelopment platform, known as Maintain, can be called directly from WebFOCUS. Over the next24 months we will be creating tighter linkages between WebFOCUS and Maintain to enable moreapplications to provide report-decide-act capabilities.

Create Solution FrameworksUsing our platform and tools we have developed a number of application frameworks, which are acollection of application components, including data models, reports, and dashboards along withtheir source code. These frameworks accelerate the creation of a customized application in varioushorizontal and vertical areas.

The following frameworks are currently available: n Performance Management Framework, which includes a data model and over 100

performance-focus reports and views; modeled after a balanced scorecard this frameworkfocuses on measuring and managing the performance of a business at the operational level

n Insurance Reporting Framework, which provides a data model and over 70 reports, focuses onsimplifying analytical reporting in the property and casualty arm of the insurance industry

n Integrated Justice Framework, which leverages iWay Software’s integration technology toallow cross referencing of reports and other BI content across multiple law enforcement domains

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n Syndromic Surveillance Framework, in which regulatory information provided by emergencyrooms and pharmacies around a metropolitan area is sent to a central location, normalized, andloaded into a single data warehouse for reporting purposes

As part of our roadmap we are targeting and creating templates for new frameworks to acceleratethe delivery of customized solutions for common business problems.

Leverage More Data AssetsThrough our adapters we have been able to provide a way to access and manipulate structureddata anywhere. Additionally, recent work with search engines allows these adapters to beleveraged in a standard enterprise search, returning results that span the unstructured andstructured worlds. Yet, we have not given our customers a clearly defined way to manipulate andreport from information stored in unstructured documents.

We are working on adapters that will provide structure to unstructured data found in documentsmanaged by document management systems. To start, over the next 12 months we will releaseadapters for both Documentum and FileNet. This will further extend our reach into enterpriseinformation assets to provide more complete information systems.

WebFOCUS Product Roadmap

Summary

We can simplify our roadmap by describing our goals with three words – reach, simplicity, and timeliness.

The real-time continuum for business intelligence.

ReachWe are always looking for ways to deliver relevant information to new constituents. We have beenan industry leader in this area, constantly adding new sources of information and innovating tocreate new delivery paradigms. Proof of our commitment is that we were the first BI company todeliver a complete Web-based platform in 1996, years ahead of other vendors. We were the first todeliver a mobile solution with Two-Way Email in 1999. And, last year we were the first to deliver aportable, self-contained BI environment that binds function to data and enables low-cost,widespread business intelligence deployments.

SimplicityEveryone needs information to make decisions – not just technologists. We strive to simplify accessto information to enable faster user adoption and make business intelligence pervasive. Over thepast two years we have released technology that is helping to inject the simplicity of search intothe world of BI. We will continue on this path and make access to information easy for everyone.

TimelinessBusiness processes and the events and activities that define them are the richest source of businessintelligence. We will focus our technology earlier in the business cycle until every piece ofinformation can be leveraged in real time.

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