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WebFOCUS 8 is a comprehensive BI platform, helping organizations deliver information and analytics to the widest range of users. WebFOCUS 8 delivers many rich new capabilities and integrates the four critical elements for smarter decision-making: business intelligence, performance management, advanced analytics, and data integrity.
With over 250 new features and product enhancements, WebFOCUS 8 provides:
WebFOCUS 8 expands the reach of traditional business intelligence to deliver rich, real-time, consumable, customizable, interactive information to the widest audience possible. It helps users at all levels to make smarter decisions by providing:
WebFOCUS 8 includes a new BI portal that provides a highly interactive experience that is:
This gives users infinite possibilities to personalize the BI experience by tailoring the consumption of information to their own workflow preferences. The BI Portal uses a ribbon-based user interface combined with a Properties Panel similar to industry-standard products like Adobe® Dreamweaver®. As such, the portal offers an intuitive experience for both the BI analyst and the web developer for accessing styles and formatting content. All users can create a beautiful portal with minimal effort and training. The management of portals is much easier by providing security at both the portal and page level. This allows users to create a single portal for multiple groups and restrict access to pages when needed.
The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones has triggered a revolution in the way we deliver and consume information. With the emergence of touch-based UIs, BI at your fingertips has now become a reality. Information Builders has been committed to the develop once and deploy anywhere principle, which minimizes development, deployment, and training costs, and future-proofs investments as new devices and browsers continually enter a dynamic, volatile market. Furthermore, we believe that our customers should be able to re-purpose their web assets, so all WebFOCUS reports can be mobilized with no coding required, using Active Technologies.
We designed WebFOCUS Active Technologies as a web app and standardized our charting technologies on HTML5 to ensure they can be used across all devices. This results in a single source code for easy maintenance and enables even non-technical users to create rich mobile BI apps.
In addition to our mobile web apps, we also provide a native helper app for the popular iOS platform, called Mobile Faves. This app acts as a container that resides on your device and makes it easier for users to organize, access, and interact with their favorite web reports and dashboards from an iPhone® or iPad®. It is a hybrid approach that provides the best of both worlds.
The explosive growth of data has triggered innovations in data storage and processing to allow for faster query and analysis of large data stores. To address this challenge and optimize the performance of WebFOCUS, Information Builders has released WebFOCUS Hyperstage, a columnar data store that allows performance to scale significantly. Using the WebFOCUS IDE, users can load data quickly into Hyperstage without IT involvement. Since Hyperstage is schema agnostic, BI developers can retrieve data from any source and load it into Hyperstage without having to model it into specific schemas, thus reducing the need for DBAs and the time to deliver applications. Information Builders solutions include many adapters to enable access to these data stores, including social media adapters (for example, Facebook and Salesforce®).
Built on a common architecture, WebFOCUS and iWay Software integration and data integrity products work together seamlessly to cover all your information needs, from data inception to information quality and delivery.
The WebFOCUS 8 platform provides tools for cleansing, enriching, merging, and matching data sets and is the first BI platform to integrate real-time data profiling, data quality management, and master data management capabilities for measuring and managing data quality, consistency, and integrity. No other BI vendor offers this capability.
WebFOCUS 8 Client Security delivers industry-leading security, including built-in protection from common web vulnerabilities, an advanced role-based security model, enhanced integration with external security systems, and an innovative template feature that simplifies how enterprise and SaaS customers deploy secured content to new departments or tenants. Other enhancements include AES 256-bit encryption to protect information delivered by WebFOCUS ReportCaster, centralized auditing of user and administrator activity, support for commercial web access management systems, and an option to authorize users based on their groups or roles in active directory or in an LDAP server.
WebFOCUS 8 is hardened to protect applications from high severity vulnerabilities that are meant to compromise access to application data. Information Builders is a member of the Open Web Application Project, which tracks emerging web vulnerabilities and devises defenses against them. For more information, contact your local branch office.
To meet diverse user preferences and enable the best possible analysis, the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform delivers enterprise information in a wider variety of formats than any other BI solution on the market. With all of its output options, including HTML, Excel®, PDF, PowerPoint®, Flex®, and Active Technology reports, and its own new thin interactive format, WebFOCUS satisfies the broadest range of user needs, delivering data in whichever format is best suited for the task at hand. All report elements, including field names, headers, subtotals, sort breaks, styling, conditional styling, drilldowns, and images, are preserved within the report in the desired format.
WebFOCUS is ideally suited to support the cloud-initiatives of our customers and SaaS partners. The modular architecture of the platform, with built-in support for multi-tenancy, supports vertical and horizontal scaling to meet the demand of growing and fluctuating workloads. Built-in support for external security systems provides the tools required for integrating WebFOCUS into existing SaaS offerings, including single sign-on with an existing application or portal.
The line between analysts and developers is blurring as tools become easier to use, allowing more people to produce BI content. The more advanced analysts, however, demand more. They not only want better analytics, but also the ability to create interactive dashboards, mobile gadgets and widgets, interactive dashboards, and published documents.
We continue to enhance WebFOCUS InfoAssist to meet this need with more powerful functions, such as the ability to create subqueries, perform set operations, subset the data for advanced visualizations, and many more. We also continue to improve the display of information by incorporating media query technologies that adapt content to screen sizes. This makes content easier to consume across devices with different form factors, and minimizes the development effort without compromising the end-user experience.
At the same time, developers demand that the IDE environment becomes easier to use and provides more functions so they can build advanced applications easily without coding. The new generation of WebFOCUS Developer Studio will be a new ribbon-based product, named Application Studio. Like InfoAssist, it will be a task-oriented application that follows standard workflows and adheres to strict design principles for greater ease of use.
The growth of multi-dimensional data has increased the need to analyze it, tapping into new insights and deeper understanding of data patterns and trends. Cubes addressed the issues with large data volumes, but visualization of vast data requires more advanced tools and technologies. For example, in-memory computing and columnar data stores combined with new visualization techniques have made it easy for business analysts to analyze the data at fast speeds, regardless of the volume.
Information Builders is a leader in providing advanced visualizations through its Visual Discovery applications. With the new developments in multi-dimensional data, we are taking visualization to the next level by:
Most importantly, this technology can be used against any data source, thus making InfoAssist the most robust tool on the market for query and analysis.
From detailed descriptions in structured databases to the unstructured posted comments in various forms of social media, structured and unstructured data is becoming increasingly intertwined. The merging of this mixed content requires specialized solutions to help users analyze and understand the associations and deeper meaning between the two. With the Magnify search platform, raw data buried in mixed content is transformed and made searchable, exposing previously hidden details.
We are continuing to enhance the analytic capabilities of Magnify by enriching data with multiple layers of information including sentiment, taxonomic classification, and entity extraction. Users can then search across all their data sources using a single input box to find that one piece of information regardless of knowing where it resides. Magnify then goes one step further by linking found information to BI reporting tools. Furthermore, WebFOCUS is the only BI tool in the market that allows you to build both BI and search applications in a single development environment, significantly decreasing the time to market and integration effort.
Most companies recognize the potential for BI apps to help them be more proactive and agile. With forward-looking BI, decision-makers can form expectations about the future based on historical data, and act with more confidence to predict activities, allocate resources, and understand marketing trends. WebFOCUS RStat allows analysts and BI developers to collaborate in a single environment and build predictive modeling applications. Fully integrated in the WebFOCUS IDE, RStat provides a single platform for BI, data modeling, and scoring.
WebFOCUS RStat now includes prepackaged applications to provide targeted solutions for specific areas in the enterprise where the use cases and the methodologies for analysis are well known and fairly standard. For example, Price Optimization, Marketing Mix Optimization, and Demand Forecasting are new out-of-the-box RStat applications that save development costs and accelerate time to market, allowing business users to start using them immediately with minimal help from IT.
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