Review: WebFOCUS Maximizes On Business Intelligence

As a company that specializes in BI solutions for the apparel industry, Sky IT Group has worked closely retailers such as Valentino, Garan, Liz Claiborne, Nautica, Michael Kors and Burlington Coat Factory to put BI technology to work throughout the enterprise. Whether that involves analyzing 852 reports, understanding aged inventory or monitoring available-to-ship schedules, BI plays a vital role.

To that end, Sky IT Group uses WebFOCUS, an enterprise BI platform from New York-based Information Builders that's designed for executive, analytical and operational reporting. Thanks to a browser-based interface and extensive data-access capabilities, the software makes data available, accessible and meaningful to virtually any person or application.

Sky IT Group uses WebFOCUS to create and deploy richly formatted reports for customers from virtually any enterprise data, in real time. And because WebFOCUS is architected for the Web, these organizations can extend powerful reporting capabilities to everyone who impacts the business. Users simply need a Web browser to obtain and share information; no plug-ins or special software are necessary.

WebFOCUS is germane to Sky IT Group's business, in particular, because of its ability to run natively on the IBM iSeries platform, along with virtually any other platform Sky IT Group has encountered. It offers fast, native access to a wide variety of data sources that traditional SQL-based reporting tools can't access directly, if at all. It also provides a rich development environment to rapidly build complex production reports with many interactive features.

For VARs, WebFOCUS and related Information Builders products provide three key capabilities -- pervasive reporting solutions, mature development tools and comprehensive integration technology -- as well as reasonable licensing. Here's a closer look at each area:

Reporting Solutions For All Types Of Users
WebFOCUS has highly advanced, ad hoc reporting functionality, which makes it easy for VARs to present parametered reporting output for different types of users. Business analysts and developers can use the software to create parametered reports with user-definable dimensions, calculations, measures and other variables. Because of these flexible run-time selection criteria, a single HTML report template can replace dozens of hard-coded reports. End uers can choose their own parameters and drill-downs through a standard Web browser.

Thanks to these parameter-driven reporting templates, data is easily accessed in its current location and format and then securely published on the Web. And since most users instinctively understand browser interfaces, this approach reduces the learning curve for accessing and receiving information.

The uses for such technology are numerous. For example, a CEO might use a WebFOCUS BI dashboard to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), applying what-if scenarios to analyze possible ways to improve sell-through and margins. Meanwhile, a vice president of production could use BI technology to identify the source of shipping delays, and sales teams could use it to view order status online.

WebFOCUS users enjoy enhanced visualization capabilities via a variety of graphs, charts, scatter plots, GIS mapping capabilities and publishing options. They also can perform subset calculations, allowing them to quickly obtain subtotals or other measures after filtering data. Users can view boardroom-quality reports in Excel, Excel PivotTable, PDF, HTML,and XML formats. Mature Development Tools For VARs
WebFOCUS includes a complete report generation and deployment workbench that lets developers design complex reports and publish them to reporting portals as a seamless process.

In addition to the product's graphical, point-and-click development environment, VAR can make use of its macro language, called Dialogue Manager, to generate much of the underlying code. In some cases, this code becomes a foundation for creating enhanced reporting and analysis functions that exceed the capabilities of other BI tools. WebFOCUS can query and update databases, manage changes to Web content and interact with leading ERP and warehouse management packages. It's a flexible tool for creating just about any enterprise reporting application.

The WebFOCUS environment includes several useful development options. WebFOCUS Developer Studio is a GUI-based development platform that enables rapid development of virtually any type of Web-based report, including charts and graphs. While other business intelligence solutions Sky IT Group has used only allow you to build reports or to query information, WebFOCUS Developer Studio lets you build content-rich Web applications that include business logic. WebFOCUS also supports Web services, which empowers developers to create and publish any WebFOCUS report as a Web service callable from J2EE or .Net environments.

Comprehensive Data Access And Integration
In recent years, Sky IT Group expanded its BI practice to include designing data marts and corporate data warehouses for consumer goods manufacturers and retailers. The most challenging part of the projects involved gathering, cleansing and loading data, or ETL (extract, transform and load). For that chore, we rely on Information Builders' Data Migrator product.

Data Migrator uses all of the multitiered server components of WebFOCUS plus an intuitive GUI for designing ETL routines, allowing our data management and ETL solutions meet a range of customer needs. For example, they can access data in operational systems and data warehouses, as well as detail data via drill-throughs.

Access techniques can include using ETL to extract, transform and load data directly into a data warehouse or mart; directly accessing operational data stores or the files that service operational systems; transparently drilling and joining data warehouses to operational data; using the operational systems' application functions to access data; and trickle-feeding a data warehouse to populate and refresh with real-time information.

Data Migrator is an ideal tool for data migration tasks. It features native access to nearly 100 data sources, simplifying the job of extracting and loading data from legacy systems. A built-in scheduler lets users orchestrate complex ETL sequences as part of nightly data warehouse updates.

Keeping An Eye On Cost
Information Builders offers very affordable licensing terms, especially for VARs that primarily create self-service reports for their customers. VARs also should consider non-financial issues -- such as easier access to information, better dissemination of knowledge and increased productivity for workers -- as benefits to spotlight for customers. WebFOCUS addresses these requirements by fulfilling the reporting needs of many types of users. It includes an efficient, server-based reporting architecture, and it supplies everything from complex analysis tools to standard, drill-down reporting through a simple and intuitive browser interface.

With Information Builders, Sky IT BI solutions integrate readily with most ERP systems and can deliver reporting capabilities to small and midsize companies that were previously available only to larger firms. The flexibility and power of WebFOCUS allows Sky IT Group to rapidly develop rich BI portals that give its customers just-in-time reports from any part of their business.

STEPHEN CZETTY is vice president in charge of business intelligence-related services at Sky IT Group, a New York-based solution provider. He has more than two decades of experience with data management and business intelligence solutions.