Informix Delivers a New Technology for Visual Business
Intelligence; Informix Visionary Enables Dynamic Visual
Access to Strategic Corporate Data
ACTION ITEMS
Informix Corporation, a technology leader in enterprise database-powered solutions, has announced the availability of Informix Visionary, a powerful business visualizer that enables the corporate user to develop flexible, easy, low-cost solutions for insightful decision-making.
Visionary is a no-code, enabling technology that brings powerful visual information and exploration capabilities to Informix Dynamic Server with Universal Data Option. Informix Visionary provides a window, or portal, into all corporate data and is the ideal means of accessing a federated data environment. In a related announcement, Informix announced its federated data strategy.
Informix Visionary dramatically reduces the cost of analyzing strategic data and provides a much broader group of corporate users direct visual access to and exploration of the database for increased competitive advantage. With Informix Visionary, enterprises can now make critical business decisions much faster and more accurately based on the most current data available.
"Informix and its partners understand the requirements for the new way business decisions are made," said Mitch Kramer, senior consultant, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Patricia Seybold Group." Informix Visionary significantly enhances Informix Dynamic Server with Universal Data Option by enabling the utilization of visualization technology."
How Visionary Works
To make accurate and timely decisions, business executives and analysts need new and unique solutions to investigate a broad range of business data in ways other than traditional charts and row/column tabular displays. Informix Visionary allows the user to graphically explore the business enterprise and obtain immediate analysis of trends and situations without traditional programming. It allows for direct access to the database, using standard graphical layouts and wizards, and transforms abstract data into meaningful visual displays. Informix Visionary also enables intelligent navigation through 'wormholes', a zoom capability which retrieves more detailed levels of data.
"Today's market forces and more complex business problems are driving the need for a new class of applications," said Dr. Michael Stonebraker, chief technical officer, Informix. "The increased utilization of Web applications and object-relational database management systems, for example, have more demanding requirements than traditional applications for business data analysis, and as a result cannot be written using traditional tools. Using Informix Dynamic Server with Universal Data Option, Informix Visionary effectively solves these business problems by visually representing enterprise business data, allowing Informix to provide first class solutions for our partners and end users."
Informix Visionary includes Visionary Studio, a no-code authoring environment, and a runtime viewer that can be embedded as an ActiveX control providing seamless integration with other best-of-breed development tools.
Informix Visionary in the Enterprise
Informix Visionary provides a complete visual solution for analyzing strategic data across departmental and divisional boundaries of the entire business enterprise. Now in its 25th year of operation and known for its innovation, Visionary Beta customer Louisiana-Pacific Corporation is a major forestry products company headquartered in Portland, Oregon with manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and in Canada and Ireland.
"Louisiana-Pacific Corporation wanted to create a business intelligence tool that could simplify the process of gathering data throughout the enterprise while at the same time make the data more valuable and easier to understand," said Jason Shanks, information technology business analyst for Louisiana-Pacific. "Informix Visionary was the only product we found that could do that. Both from a development and end-user standpoint, there is nothing else available that is as easy-to-use and adds such value to our business. Everyone in the company who has seen what Visionary is capable of is tremendously impressed."
Visionary "QuickStart" Package Offers Customers Rapid Deployment Program
The "QuickStart" package includes ten seats each of Visionary, Informix Dynamic Server and Universal Data Option. Also included are two weeks of dedicated Informix Consulting and two customer seats in a Visionary training class. The training class provides a basic introduction to Visionary and teaches users how to present data visually using different graphical layouts and controls rather than on flat, text-based forms with numbers. The Visionary "QuickStart" package delivers a very costeffective solution to customers and provides them with the training and expertise to facilitate creation and deployment of other Visionary solutions throughout the enterprise.
Availability
Informix Visionary is available immediately in North America. Outside of North America, contact your local Informix representative for availability.
About Informix
Informix Corporation, based in Menlo Park, California, provides innovative database products that assist the world's major corporations to attain competitive advantage. Informix is widely recognized as the technology leader for corporate computing environments ranging from small workgroups to very large parallel processing applications. Informix's database server, application development tools, superior customer service, and strong partnerships enable the company to be at the forefront of major information technology solution areas including data warehousing, high performance OLTP, and Web/e-commerce. For more information, contact the sales office nearest you or visit Informix's Web site at http://www.informix.com/.