Business Objects Announces Availability of
WebIntelligence 2.0
ACTION ITEMS
Business Objects, a leading provider of integrated enterprise decision support tools, announced production availability of WebIntelligence 2.0, the new release of its enterprise query, reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) solution for the World Wide Web. The new release offers features for extranet deployments, a new OLAP module for drilling in charts and tables, and numerous new options for report creation and distribution.
"WebIntelligence 2.0 sets new standards for architecture and functionality in a web business intelligence solution," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "The convergence of decision support and the internet is creating tremendous opportunity for organizations to deliver what we call e-business intelligence -- which is the sharing of data over the web with customers, partners and suppliers.
"The burgeoning e-business intelligence market is driving opportunities for companies to be more competitive and deliver new services to market. At Business Objects we intend to be the leader in the e-business intelligence market and WebIntelligence 2.0 provides a key step in that direction."
WebIntelligence 2.0 claims to be the first web decision support (DSS) tool to deliver advanced extranet features for deploying e-business intelligence applications. These features include:
Signed applet. WebIntelligence 2.0 utilizes digital certificate technology from VeriSign to digitally sign the Java applet, providing added security through third-party verification. This is important for companies deploying extranet applications because a "signed" applet's security is guaranteed, it is downloaded once, and stored in the browser cache. This state-of-the-art security benefits end users by reducing network traffic and increasing overall performance.
Firewall support. WebIntelligence 2.0 is designed to work with multiple firewalls, thus eliminating one of the biggest challenges to extranet deployment. To work in extranet environments, DSS tools must be able to function through various firewall configurations on both the server and client side, without requiring changes to network security. Some DSS tools use network protocols that require configuration changes to the firewall. WebIntelligence now uses only the hyper text transport protocol (HTTP) for applet-to-application-server communications which enables it to work with multiple firewall configurations and ensures a secure environment between companies.
Auditing support. WebIntelligence 2.0 now has auditing capabilities which enable customers to track user activity and monitor the system, store this data in a relational database, and then access and use that data as the basis for billing customers. This new feature gives information providers all the data they need to track action on their server and generate bills based on subscription, usage time, the amount of data accessed, or the number of documents used.
Extranet features introduced with the first release of WebIntelligence include profile-based reports and security. Profile-based reports enable administrators to create a single report which, when accessed by a user, automatically gives them just the information they are authorized to receive.
This saves administrators from creating and maintaining a separate report for every individual customer or supplier, each of whom needs the same report format but should see just their specific information. Profile-based security gives administrators detailed control on a per-user basis over all aspects of data access and resource use, from what data users can see to the functions they can perform.
A new OLAP module called WebIntelligence Explorer allows users to drill into charts and tables for additional analysis. In WebIntelligence 2.0 users can drill on information at three levels. First, administrators can provide predefined interactive reports. When users drill in these reports, the information is retrieved directly from a multidimensional cache on the server.
Then if a user requires more information they can drill automatically through a report into the database. WebIntelligence automatically generates the one or more structured query language (SQL) statements required to retrieve the data. All of this is transparent to the user, who does not have to know anything about where the data is stored.
In addition, the product supports "hyperdrill," where users can get to information beyond the database by clicking on a hyperlink within a report and drilling to any site on the web.
With the new OLAP module WebIntelligence provides users with true thin-client, integrated query, reporting, and OLAP tool for the web. Integration enables users to seamlessly perform reporting and analysis without having to switch among several tools, and allows information systems professionals to more easily set up and maintain the DSS environment.
WebIntelligence 2.0 includes a number of enhancements to the core query and reporting capabilities including:
WebIntelligence is now widely used throughout the Business Objects customer base. Customers using WebIntelligence 2.0 include:
One Infrastructure For Full- and Thin-Clients
In many enterprise deployments, customers have a mix of thin- and full-client desktops and are in the midst of a transition between how they deploy client/server and web-based products. Business Objects provides excellent support for mixed full/thin and transient environments by providing a common infrastructure between its full-client BusinessObjects and thin-client WebIntelligence query, reporting, and OLAP tools.
The two tools share the same metadata infrastructure, which means that customers can set up, maintain, and administer a single DSS environment to support all users across the enterprise regardless of their client platform. This reduces administration cost and facilitates organizations in transition to the web.
Architecture
WebIntelligence 2.0 builds upon the distributed component architecture introduced with the first release of the product. This distributed component architecture is built on common object request broker (CORBA) compliant technology from Inprise Corp., thus ensuring system scalability, load balancing and automatic failover. The user interface for WebIntelligence 2.0 is written exclusively in Java and hyper text markup language (HTML).
With this architecture and interface, WebIntelligence eliminates the need for client-side installation and maintenance of both application software and database middleware, providing organizations with a cost-effective way to broadly deploy DSS capabilities.
WebIntelligence 2.0 is available immediately. WebIntelligence is priced at $595 per user. The new OLAP module, WebIntelligence Explorer, can be added for $395 per user.
Business Objects provides a complete suite of decision support tools including query, reporting, online analytical processing, data mining, and DSS administration for both client/server and internet environments. For more information, see http://www.businessobjects.com