Metrics Moving Beyond QA - SD Times On The Web

Advanced Corda CenterView™ Data Visualization for the BusinessObjects™ Intelligence Platform Corda Technologies presents a white paper on pervasive BI. The BusinessObjects business in...

From Mobile to SOA: A Guide for Optimized Application Deployment Customer need has driven the emergence of multiple computing tiers. Today’s application d...

e-Kit: Web Application Security Is your network secure? What about your web applications. If IT security is your top p...

Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...

Businesses spread wealth of data via Web services
By David Rubinstein

May 1, 2002 — Two companies have recently brought to market solutions that ease the distribution of business analytics via the Web using Web services.

"From product manager to strategist to engineer, there are folks involved in delivering products and servicing companies who deal with a plethora of data they can't access in an analytic way," said David Butler, vice president of marketing at analytics solution provider Spotfire Inc. (www.spotfire.com). "It's about making the analytics process- and data-centric."

"There is a need to get information to the whole organization," said Girish Pancha, senior vice president at Informatica Corp. (www.informatica.com), a competing analytics firm. "Web services is one of the delivery mechanisms. It's a great fit for a pure thin-client solution."

Spotfire last month released DecisionSite 7.0, a tool for integrating data with analytics throughout a product life-cycle process, according to Butler. Web services standards, he claimed, provide a way to deliver the metrics that describe to businesses how they need to interact with their customers and how they should build their applications to achieve those goals. DecisionSite 7.0 includes a library of commonly used statistical routines for data analysis, Butler said. A separate product, DecisionSite Developer 7.0, also recently released, is the tool set that allows users to configure the analytics tool specifically for that company's business processes.

Meanwhile, Informatica last month announced the latest release of its analytics delivery platform, which allows users to build Web-based metrics "dashboards" to gain access to key company metrics, according to Helen Dwight, Informatica's senior director of marketing for platform technology. "The key is to deliver information anywhere the user might be," she said. Informatica's solution is built to J2EE specifications, and supports BEA's WebLogic and IBM's WebSphere application servers. "We can take advantage of the scalability, fault tolerance and 24x7 availability of the app server," she added.

Pancha said Informatica provides developers and business managers a view into the integrated data, and that its analytics server can be embedded into J2EE-compliant portals to give users single sign-on access to the metrics and other key data. Because Informatica's solution is Web-based, users can basically deliver real-time analytic data to those who need it, either within or beyond the boundaries of the organization.

Informatica's analytics platform, version 3.1, is available now and sells for $142,500 for an unlimited number of users.

Butler noted that customers could use the two solutions together, as he said the Informatica products are focused on real-time dashboard analytics while Spotfire provides "non-stop what-ifs" that explore the options upon which business decisions are made.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/26488

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK