Gartner BI Summit 2011: Mobile, Open Source, Keener Insights are Keys 
This week, leading provider of BI, analytics and master data management are gathering in Los Angeles as Gartner holds its Business Intelligence Summit. IDN offers some summary highlights from the show.
This week, leading provider of BI, analytics and master data management are gathering in Los Angeles as Gartner holds its Business Intelligence Summit. IDN offers some summary highlights from the show.
Attendees and exhibitors focused on the next wave in broad adoption and utility from BI, including ways to support more data, more intuitive ways to support non-specialists, quicker analytics delivery and, of course, mobile BI.
Gartner Shows Mobile BI Momentum Growing
Starting with mobile BI, a recent Gartner Predicts 2011 report stated, “By 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.” Notably, several companies used the BI Summit to launch or demo new mobile BI offerings. Here’s a quick tour:
Information Builders demoed and discussed its WebFOCUS Mobile Faves app, which works on iPad and iPhone devices. It provides users an easy and native way to view, store and manage any mobile WebFOCUS Business Intelligence content in all supported formats -- and to view dashboards delivered by Information Builders performance management framework (PMF).The app allows users to distribute BI content to HTML, Active Technologies HTML, and Adobe PDF.
"By 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices."
Predicts 2011
Gartner
When installed, Mobile Faves is auto-setup to get content from a server on the Internet where you can view sample business content. You can add your own WebFOCUS Mobile Faves-capable Web servers to the list with a few taps. The app also lets customers configure one or more WebFOCUS servers and set up user security to access Mobile Faves; list available mobile content and allow users to view it by tapping it in the list; store and view previously-run history for viewing offline, and for your future reference; and share a Mobile Fave with any email users you designate.
MeLLmo Inc. demonstrated the latest innovations for its Roambi interactive mobile analytics application. Roambi transforms business information into immersive, interactive dashboard-style analytics for the iPad or iPhone. The company was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in 2011 for Analytics and Business Intelligence, noting that “awareness of the need to interpret data for better decisions and improved processes has never been greater,” according to Gartner.
Santiago Becerra, chairman and co-founder of MeLLmo added, “With the increasing adoption of Apple iOS mobile devices in the enterprise, we are more excited than ever to demonstrate the leading mobile solution for transforming business intelligence into simple, intuitive and engaging analytics.” Roambi Lite, Roambi Pro, Roambi for SAS and Roambi ES3 make up a complete suite of Roambi products for individuals, workgroups, SMBs and enterprises.
Strategy Companion Corp. released its Analyzer Mobile, a BI application that enables organizations to support mobile BI by deploying both new and existing Analyzer reports and dashboards to multiple mobile devices including iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets, BlackBerry smartphones, and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Analyzer Mobile can also automatically detect the user’s mobile device type and customize reports and dashboards.
Analyzer mobile BI reports are created once, using Analyzer’s zero-footprint browser interface. Analyzer Mobile also supports touchpad-driven drill down, drill up, filtering, zooming, panning, sorting, and measure selection. “While providing the same kind of user experience as fat mobile clients, Analyzer Mobile requires no software to be downloaded to anyone's desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet -- making it extraordinarily easy, secure, and cost-effective to manage and to deploy,” said company senior vice president Bob Abernethy.
LogiXML released Logi Mobile, a major new enhancement to its Logi Info flagship web-based BI platform. Logi Mobile lets companies quickly design mobile BI applications and deploy them across a variety of devices, eliminating the need for specialized development skills and investment in maintaining a diverse set of native mobile applications.
“Most BI companies have built proprietary, device-specific mobile BI products and this is certainly one approach,” said Brett Jackson, CEO, LogiXML. “However, we believe … our customers prefer a different approach. We are giving them the ability to continue to develop their BI applications within Logi Info, which is familiar to them, and extend their applications to any mobile device without the headache of deploying, managing and supporting specialized, device-specific products.”
Logi Mobile leverages HTML 5, allowing IT to support a devices with less cost and complexity, and still deliver highly-requested features, such as geo-location, push-button emails and texts, screen size and orientation detection, and on-demand scrolling and caching. Logi Mobile supports popular mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
Visualization, Open Source Self-Service BI
Also on Display at Gartner BI Summit
Beyond mobile, other Gartner exhibitors focused on ways to drive home BI’s capabilities to deliver improved KPIs, provide richer self-service experiences, and the use of open source BI to cut cost and complexity and expand the ease of use for MDM (master data management).
Among them:
MicroStrategy showcased its latest release MicroStrategy 9.2, which sports a new “Visual Insight” feature to let business users explore and manipulate data visually and quickly with ease. The update also allows organizations to embed more information into interactive dashboards, and then share those with others.
MicroStrategy 9.2 also allows greater use of in-memory BI to speed results and lets companies avoid refreshing their entire in-memory data stores, and simply update incrementally. Users can also transparently combine multidimensional data with relational data and retain full analytical capabilities, including drilling, pivoting, sorting, adding thresholds, aggregating and adding calculations.
Quiteria, a leading European developer of advanced and predictive analytics, launched its Quiterian Dynamic Data Web 3.0. This self-service and agile BI platform adds a cloud subscription model; improved advanced and predictive analysis techniques, such as new data pre-processing methods; better selection, installation and user management; and validation tests (in the C4.5 Decision Tree technique).
Josep Arroyo, Quiterian CEO, said: “The substantial improvements in functionality and performance in release 3.0 and the new cloud-based subscription model clearly establish DDWeb 3.0 as a complementary business intelligence solution for companies that already have implemented traditional BI reporting environments.” The company also announced expansion of its US partner network at the conference.
Orchestra Networks announced EBX5, an end-to-end, model-driven and flexible MDM platform that promotes collaboration among business users, data stewards and IT experts. Orchestra’s unified platform approach allows all stakeholders to take advantage of MDM content and features such as: data modeling, authoring, hierarchy management, governance workflow and complex quality rules definition capabilities. EBX5 is designed to provide business users control of all MDM features, including modeling and governance definition.
Cirrus Technologies, Command Prompt and Prometheus Research, three leading PostgreSQL-based technology firms, announced they will partner for a combined solution to deliver robust, scalable end-to-end BI solution from data warehousing to dashboards.
The solution is built on Cirrus’s Stado flexible analytical environment, which can scale linearly while still appearing as a single database to applications. This is well suited to analytics applications and allows users to leverage low-cost hardware. “Stado, being fully open source, allows organizations to focus their budgets on solving problems instead of on proprietary hardware and software to run their data warehouse,” said Jim Mlodgenski, CEO of Cirrus Technologies.
Command Prompt is a leading provider of PostgreSQL integration services, training, engineering, consulting and architecture. Prometheus Research produces the HTSQL (instant web API), and HTRAF application toolkits.
Enterprise Signal Inc. released SurfBI Business Intelligence Applications 3.0, adding new metrics/KPIs in several new business-focused modules. SurfBI BI applications provide complete, pre-built industry standard analytics containing KPIs, metrics and analytic workflows from multiple enterprise source systems delivered through iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. New SurfBI modules are: Process Manufacturing Analytics; Fixed Asset Analytics; and Service Execution Analytics to measure field service/customer service organizations.
“With the release of the new modules, we have included more pre-packaged content, in additional functional areas that would allow organizations to deploy BI rapidly and cost effectively,” said Vikas Kumar, CTO, Enterprise Signal Inc. SurfBi comes with a pre-built canonical enterprise-enabled data model and pre-built integration with Oracle BI and E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Salesforce.com and others.
