IBI Previews BI Application Upgrade

According to Michael Corcoran, IBI senior vice president and chief marketing officer, this new release brings together many of the data management facilities that IBI is known for inside the framework of its BI application to help lower costs by eliminating the need for separate third-party middleware to access enterprise data sources.

Taken together, these tools allow customers to use WebFocus 8 as a platform for analyzing streams of data in real time, as opposed to waiting for batch updates to be made to the system.

The new version also includes new facilities for managing corporate performance, the ability to personalize dashboards and create applets inside the WebFocus 8 application framework.

WebFocus 8 also adds new visual discovery tools and support for the open source R language that is increasingly being used to develop predictive analytic applications that can be embedded inside WebFocus 8. Finally, WebFocus 8 also comes with more than 400 key performance indicator (KPI) modules associated with monitoring business processes in various vertical industry segments.

Corcoran said that as BI evolves into a strategic business tool, customers want a comprehensive application platform as opposed to “old school” BI applications that required major investments in additional tools and services before they could become useful to the business.

The various components of WebFocus 8 will be made available through the course of this year.