A White Paper
Embedding Business Analytics to Improve
Your Application’s Value Proposition
1 Executive Summary
2 Buy vs. Build: The Benefits to Your Application Products 4 Proving the Model
4 CDS Global
4 Chrome River Technologies
5 Plex Systems
5 Sparta Systems
5 Unisys
6 Why Information Builders?
6 Features That Matter
7 Predictive Analytics
7 Social Media Analytics
7 InfoAssist
8 Data Discovery
8 Integration
8 Data Integrity
9 Conclusion
9 Our Capabilities at a Glance
Table of Contents
Information Builders
1
Executive Summary
Interest in transforming data from business applications into actionable information has created a resounding explosion in offerings for business analytics. The amount of data generated and captured across multiple sources can be overwhelming. New analytical capabilities capitalize on your big data as well as data stemming from a wide array of applications, including sales, inventory, marketing, loyalty, web, finance, mobile, sensors, and other systems. Incorporating market-leading analytics into your application helps you improve your value proposition and drive new revenue while letting your development staff focus on your core functionality.
Whether you’re selling on-premise applications, SaaS applications, or moving to SaaS from on-premise, the incorporation of embedded BI and analytics with a high return on investment (ROI) will improve application usage, customer retention, and your bottom line. A recent
examination by analyst research firm Nucleus Research found that every dollar organizations spent on business intelligence (BI) applications such as embedded analytics earned back $10.66. 1 Solution providers spread deployment and development costs over a solution’s implementation to many customers. Incorporating proven analytics drives faster return on investment and more revenue. In turn, organizations that take advantage of these deployments get applications that provide customization and branding capabilities, enabling maximum control over look and feel with a minimum of configuration time. In less than a year, one solution provider changed its business analytics offerings; added new functionality, including predictive and social analytics in tiered phases; and drove 15 new deals with Fortune 1000 customers.
Ensuring your users have a consistent user experience is vital. Organizations that invest in BI achieve greater ROI more effectively than via any other IT investment – the Nucleus Research proves this point as will case studies later in this paper. Partnering affords you the opportunity to strategically add components (predictive and social analytics or mobile BI) and test premium pricing tiers and customer acceptance. Experienced BI vendors also have extensive expertise with databases and applications, allowing you to cleanse data, integrate any database or application, and then analyze it. This array of data availability speeds time to value and usage of your application.
Embedded BI quickly proves itself by transforming data into dynamic, relevant information. To accomplish this, it needs to be used and shared by as many employees in as many functions as possible. By providing wide access via the web, your application will become pervasive throughout customers’ organizations. This also ensures your application will be built into the everyday workflow of numerous users versus just a select group of divisional or management personnel, which increases reliance on your application, customer retention, and revenue stream. No one knows your application better than your in-house developers, so you’ll want their expertise to be directed toward getting maximum value out of the data and processes that it contains. But you don’t need them wasting time on developing reporting and analytical capabilities that you can get off the shelf.
What can proven analytics do for your in-house team?
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n Free IT and R&D from having to generate reports by delivering them quickly via e-mail or browser ■
n Increase the amount of data easily available to decision-makers ■
n Boost revenue by improving the availability and flexibility of critical information
Buy vs. Build: The Benefits to Your Applications
Information Builders
3
Information Builders can provide a complete, end-to-end reporting and analytics solution within your application. From integrated authentication using industry standards to full report creation and design, embedding customized reports and dashboards into applications rapidly is possible. This means that you can add best-of-breed BI and analytics without having to invest years in its development or maintenance.
Impactful BI helps end-users break down information silos and create a culture of sharing information across business lines, collaborate on information’s potential impact, and work to ensure the meeting of corporate goals and objectives. The best solutions provide robust analytical capabilities for non-technical users. Self-service capabilities for users are paramount, as are customization and process improvement. New aspects of your application shouldn’t impede user productivity by being alien to users. Aligning your goals and design needs with your analytics partner will guarantee user acceptance, ingrain analytics into your users’ everyday usage, and meet your application standards.
Improving business processes and refocusing on core business missions without the need for in-house development is paramount to the success of initiatives driven by application providers. By adding BI expertise to existing applications, solution providers are positioned to complement the services they already deliver and expand their offerings to new customers.
Providing easy access to information is additive and users will become more sophisticated in their data and analytics needs. The right BI tool will significantly increase user adoption and reliance on their application to make data-driven decisions. Role-based dashboards and user-configurable, self-service parameterized reports enable users to develop, save, and run their own reports instantaneously. By comparison, homegrown solutions are often resistant to changes or enhancements.
Here are just a few examples of how solutions providers are adding value with embedded BI and analytics. These organizations are Information Builders partners using the WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform:
CDS Global
CDS Global is a leading provider of outsourced business solutions for e-commerce, payment processing, marketing, order management, and fulfillment. The company built and deployed a SaaS-based reporting environment called InFOCUS Circ+ aimed at the company’s more than 150 publisher clients, who can now achieve a clear view of business metrics by visualizing circulation, fulfillment, and order-management data via the Internet. Thanks to the integration of WebFOCUS, users can create reports that combine data and interactive controls in a single, self-contained HTML or PDF file to conduct deep analysis and drill-downs, even when they are disconnected from the network. John Goering, executive director of Product Management for CDS Global, believes that, “While there is a consistent set of data that resonates with all of our clients, it is critical to provide a solution that allows them to present, analyze, and manipulate that data in a way that aligns with their unique business needs. InFOCUS Circ+ provides that critical data while allowing them the appropriate level of customization.”
Chrome River Technologies
Chrome River, which provides online expense reporting and spend-management solutions, can now demonstrate sophisticated reporting capabilities to its prospects. “That’s hugely important,” says Allan Rich, Chrome River’s chief executive officer. “Additionally, WebFOCUS frees up our internal development resources, so we can focus on building core functionality instead of creating reporting tools. Information Builders supported our efforts to develop key reports, supported our security and multi-tenancy requirements, and was able to link report content back to documents held in the Chrome River database.” Chrome River’s users now have in-depth analytical capabilities and can generate their own user-guided reports, including complex reports and dashboards, containing highly sophisticated charts and graphs. As a result, clients have better visibility into spending patterns, so they can achieve greater control over their expenses. By examining information from many perspectives, such as sales, marketing, executive, customer satisfaction, and vendor supplies, a more complete picture of operations is gained and customers can more accurately plan for the future. This cements usage of Chrome River’s application and drives revenue for the company.
Information Builders
5 Plex Systems
Plex Systems Inc. is the developer of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for the manufacturing enterprise. Until recently, customers had to create reports in an SQL programming environment. “We needed an easier way for users to get to the heart of their data,” says David Shugars, senior software engineer at Plex Systems. Today, this active customer base uses WebFOCUS InfoAssist to create their own BI environments – complete with customizable portals, dashboards, and a tremendous variety of reports. “Other ERP systems are more concerned with financial information, but if you don’t have good information at the bottom, you are not going to have good information at the top,” Shugars contends. “InfoAssist is a huge enhancement over our SQL reporting tool. It removes barriers between users and their data.”
Sparta Systems
Sparta Systems, an industry pioneer and leading provider of enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS), enables businesses to safely and efficiently deliver their products to market. Its TrackWise EQMS, a trusted standard among highly regulated industries, is used by quality, manufacturing, and regulatory affairs professionals to manage compliance, reduce risk, and improve safety across the global enterprise. The company’s customers include the top 30 pharmaceutical firms, the top seven medical device companies, and leading household consumer goods and electronics brands. Sparta strategically added components of Information Builders’ products recently. “Information Builders’ product suite gives us a seamless way to deliver embedded analytics and self-service BI to our users,” says Joby George, product manager, Sparta Systems. “We are excited at the market reaction and look forward to further embedding additional WebFOCUS products in our product line.” Sparta Systems has added components of WebFOCUS in a phased approach that is driving new business and enabling existing customers to get more out of their quality data.
Unisys
Unisys helps air cargo organizations like Air Canada and Spirit Airlines achieve success via the most powerful open cargo system in the world, delivered as a multi-tenant offering and within a community framework that keeps it ahead of regulatory and industry developments. The company recently reached a milestone on one of its cloud servers, which has run non-stop for more than 1,500 days and executed over three billion transactions in that time. “From the early days of the Internet, Unisys has been leveraging the power of the web to allow our clients to book, manage, and control air cargo transactions securely and reliably in a cloud-based, software-as-a-service model,” said Christopher Shawdon, vice president, Logistics Solutions at Unisys. By integrating WebFOCUS 8, the rich data captured by the Unisys cargo system can be accessed anywhere and from any Internet-connected device.
Founded in 1975, Information Builders delivers state-of-the-art technology that is transforming business across numerous industries. We have 14,000 customers deploying our solutions, which integrate more than 300 databases and applications, cleanse data, and transform that data into actionable information via the web.
Information Builders provides:
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n Complete access to information without the heavy investment of time and money
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n Scalable and extendable capabilities that grow as your company grows
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n The ability to leverage analytics on any platform – the cloud, mainframe, Linux, AIX, or Windows
Information Builders’ products work by themselves or together to help cut costs, reduce risk, achieve compliance, and improve business performance. WebFOCUS Intelligence, the industry’s most comprehensive BI platform, offers easy-to-use BI, business analytics, and performance management capabilities to promote a proactive business culture that helps organizations gain a competitive edge. The iWay Integration Suite works on any platform, interoperates with proprietary technologies as well as industry standards, supports more than 300 database and application adapters, and lays the foundation for a real-time, integrated enterprise. The iWay Data Integrity Suite allows you to integrate, enrich, and transform data into relevant, timely, and usable information.
Since it is web-based, WebFOCUS is simple for users, yet centralized for IT management and control. WebFOCUS provides a robust, multi-faceted infrastructure that works seamlessly with multiple levels of multi-tenant security, including website, data, and application security, as well as high-level encryption. This is particularly important because it ensures that data cannot be intercepted as it is transferred from the web application to the user’s desktop, preventing clients from gaining access to other customers’ information and assets.
WebFOCUS components can be added as needed. Features such as the platform’s dashboard, performance management capabilities, enterprise search, and visualization and mapping tools, empower business users to conduct sophisticated analyses without coding or IT expertise. Decisions can now be made in days, not weeks.
WebFOCUS 8 Essential Features
New and updated features in WebFOCUS 8 ensure a premier embedded BI solution that continues to grow as your company grows. These include:
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n Native support for multi-tenancy – Service providers can reduce costs by securely hosting
customers in a shared environment that can quickly scale to accommodate growing demand
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n Powerful security – Service providers gain unprecedented control of which WebFOCUS
features are available to customers through customizable roles. Providers can differentiate and monetize their reporting service by selectively offering features such as ad hoc reporting, report scheduling, end-user content sharing, and delegated administration
Information Builders
7
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n Tenant on-boarding templates – This industry-first automates the process of creating content
folders, groups, roles, and security policies for new customers. WebFOCUS features several SaaS templates to simplify on-boarding, and new ones can easily be developed to meet specific business requirements
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n Organization-wide deployment – InfoApps are interactive, purpose-built business intelligence
(BI) applications that make BI content more readily accessible to those business users who don’t have the skills or technical savvy to use complex reporting and analysis tools. Using WebFOCUS, organizations can embed InfoApps right into their application or solution
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n Integration – Allow the user’s role, content access, and data sources to be tied to lightweight
directory access protocol (LDAP) groups, providing better security controls around tenant information
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n HTML5 deployments – Whether desktop or mobile, HTML5 ensures the look and feel of your
analytics application in any environment for greater ease of development
Predictive Analytics
The ability to anticipate and prepare for what will happen tomorrow greatly impacts the decisions organizations make today. But those decisions need to be based on real data, something
traditional reporting can’t provide. WebFOCUS RStat delivers powerful predictive analytics that enable your partners to predict future outcomes and uncover hidden relationships in their data. Now you can centrally manage, automate, and deliver predictive analytics across the enterprise or as a service.
Social Media Analytics
Every day, millions of people use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to express themselves. Their communications often include thoughts about their business experiences and opinions about products and companies they like and dislike. This is a valuable opportunity to learn more about your customers – and leverage the data they produce about products and services – in ways never before possible. Information Builders’ social media analytics deliver a combined view of social media activity, sentiment, and transaction, giving you the ability to fully understand the link between campaigns and sales.
InfoAssist
Ad hoc reporting is critical to ensuring fast, effective decision-making and the smooth execution of day-to-day operations. That’s why we offer a robust, user-friendly solution that helps companies overcome the challenges associated with traditional ad hoc reporting environments. WebFOCUS InfoAssist extends the power of WebFOCUS, providing users with the most advanced – yet simple to use – ad hoc reporting capabilities available today. With WebFOCUS InfoAssist, business users have access to all the features they need to generate even the most intricate reports and analyses on their own.
Data Discovery
Data discovery is the process of collecting and consolidating information from various back-end systems and sources, then manipulating and analyzing it to uncover patterns, trback-ends, relationships, and anomalies. Similar in many respects to data visualization, but with an interactive component, data discovery is crucial to an organization’s ability to derive true value from its enterprise information assets. WebFOCUS enhances data discovery by providing cutting-edge data visualization functionality, replacing cumbersome, complex OLAP tools and data models with intuitive and user-friendly dashboards.
Integration
How many different databases and applications do your customers use? For reporting to be effective, your organization needs to access all of them in real time. These databases are crucial to your application, and your customers may need the ability to interface each of them with various information systems.
Information Builders’ integration technology combines application data with on-premise data to ensure that your application’s reporting reflects real-time information. You can achieve seamless integration between your applications and other internal and external systems – making them an integral part of strategic initiatives such as business-to-business integration, enterprise information management, or business process automation – without the need for costly, time-consuming, high-risk hand coding. We deliver:
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n Real-time monitoring and management – Gain complete visibility into all data integration
and movement processes, so you can track status and instantly detect errors
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n Rapid development and service creation – Information Builders’ iWay platform is 100 percent
standards-based, so there’s no need for niche skills or middleware expertise. Its drag-and-drop interface enables direct connectivity to your application via service-oriented architecture services, XML, etc.
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n Unlimited integration possibilities – Our suite of pre-built adapters can connect to any
database, messaging system, or pre-packaged application
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n Flexible deployment options – Support major integration and development platforms,
including integration brokers and J2EE application servers, as well as .NET, service transactions, and event architectures over a wide variety of transport mechanisms
Data Integrity
In today’s volatile economy, organizations must tap into their enterprise information in order to stay competitive, remain profitable, and meet customer demands. Powerful data and application integration technologies must be combined with innovative data quality and master data management capabilities to ensure the accessibility, reliability, and timeliness of critical data. So organizations can optimize performance by exploiting the full potential of their information assets. iWay Integrity solutions provide comprehensive, real-time management of any information from any source. Regardless of where data resides, whether it’s in a structured or unstructured format, iWay can seamlessly cleanse and enrich it, ensuring a consistent and accurate view of data from every interaction point.
Information Builders
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Information Builders’ solutions deliver rich business intelligence, agile integration, and the best possible data integrity. Our customers seamlessly navigate the full spectrum of information management. The result is strategic differentiation driven by more effective use of your organization’s information capital while driving new capabilities and revenue.
Our Core Capabilities
Intelligence – WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform delivers rich, consumable, interactive information to the widest range of employees, managers, analysts, partners, and customers.
Integration – iWay Integration Suite is the most flexible and agile integration foundation available, providing interoperability between disparate systems and data for faster time to market on IT and business initiatives.
Integrity – iWay Data Quality and Master Data Management Suites enable profiling, analyzing, enrichment, merging, managing, and cleansing data from any source, structured or unstructured. Your application is a crucial part of your customers’ diverse information needs. It makes sense to leverage the extensive experience of Information Builders, a vendor with more than 39 years of experience in business analytics, integration, and data integrity. Our partnerships with organizations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP prove the model of embedding effective business analytics and integration solutions into both on-premise and SaaS applications.
Worldwide Offices
Corporate Headquarters Two Penn Plaza
New York, NY 10121-2898 (212) 736-4433 (800) 969-4636 United States Atlanta, GA* (770) 395-9913 Boston, MA* (781) 224-7660 Channels (770) 677-9923 Chicago, IL* (630) 971-6700 Cincinnati, OH* (513) 891-2338 Dallas, TX* (972) 398-4100 Denver, CO* (303) 770-4440 Detroit, MI* (248) 641-8820 Federal Systems, D.C.* (703) 276-9006 Florham Park, NJ (973) 593-0022 Houston, TX* (713) 952-4800 Los Angeles, CA* (310) 615-0735 Minneapolis, MN* (651) 602-9100 New York, NY* (212) 736-4433 Philadelphia, PA* (610) 940-0790 Pittsburgh, PA (412) 494-9699 San Jose, CA* (408) 453-7600 Seattle, WA (206) 624-9055 St. Louis, MO* (636) 519-1411, ext. 321 Tampa, FL (813) 639-4251 Washington, D.C.* (703) 276-9006 International Australia* Melbourne 61-3-9631-7900 Sydney 61-2-8223-0600
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