InetSoft Webcast: Business Intelligence Platform Delivers Higher Query Performance

This is the transcript of a Webcast hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Faster Business Intelligence: Visual Reporting" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Our latest BI software release has many enhancements that touch all aspects of our business intelligence platform, everything from higher query performance at the highest levels of scale, better support for MDX Sources, for things like SAP BW or Microsoft Analysis Services or Oracle Essbase. It's got easy administration, better end user ease-of-use features, greater support for portals and databases, and this just covers a few of the items in this major release, and these are largely things that have been requested by our customers.

But I have to say the feature that we believe will offer probably the most universal benefit to all of our customers in their businesses is what we’ve done to provide business people with a faster way for them to visualize their business data. And frankly, that set of features is what’s going to constitute the majority of our webcast today because I think it's the most interesting and important thing to talk about.

Now this release is just the latest stepping stone in a continuing journey of development and enablement here at InetSoft with respect to our dashboarding software. And I get asked all the time to describe the backdrop or the bigger picture that drives our development, what’s behind our vision for the future for our mash up software. And frankly, a few years ago, our goal was ambitious but relatively simple. It was to provide the broadest set of BI functionality capable of supporting the highest scale of users and data, and to do all of that with fewest IT resources.

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It’s simply the enterprise BI goal. But in last two years I have to say that the times have really changed quite a bit. Today, IT is experiencing the biggest series of transformations in the last two decades, and it's not just in BI, but it's across all of IT. It's not just the technology, but it's how and when the technology is used. And these changes are ending up changing everything. It's affecting businesses. It's affecting personal lives, personal use of technology. It's very, very comprehensive. We see a fundamental change from desktop computing to mobile computing, from tabular information consumption to visual consumption, from the physical world of servers and software to the virtual world of clouds and networks and from standalone systems to socially-enabled systems.

And to illustrate some of these points briefly, this slide here depicts with relatively stark simplicity the waves of computing over the last 50 years from mainframes to minis to PCs and most recently to the desktop Internet and all of its changes. Now this latest wave is to the mobile Internet. And all the predictions from everybody from financial analysts to the BI industry analyst, no longer the futurists even, all of them say that this newest mobile wave is going to dwarf all the previous computing waves. It's going to dwarf in both the numbers of people that are affected as you see in this slide but also in the pervasiveness of the computing, the anytime anywhere aspect of mobile computing.

But even more important perhaps and probably more subtle is the way in which mobile computing is likely to affect almost everything that we do as individuals. Mobile computing has the effect of wrapping people in software. Okay, think about that, wrapping the individual. Typically, you sit at your desk, and you use software but now we are talking about wrapping people in software so that it follows them everywhere.

And when you wrap somebody in software and make it ubiquitously available and accessible to them, it ends up changing or potentially changing everything that we write or remember, everything that we touch or carry. Look in your pocket, look in your pocket book or in your purse, look in your hand, almost anything that you carry is at risk of being replaced by mobile apps, and these mobile apps can do the same functions that the physical object did previously but do them faster and better. And when that happens, we see a fundamental shift in everything with respect to computing, and that’s really with the effect of mobile BI.

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In a similar way, there is a major sea change afoot in how information is consumed and interacted with so not just the mobile aspects but how it's presented to users, and that’s what you see in this chart. Traditional BI or old BI as it’s labeled in this chart depended on printed reports. OLAP analysis is the mainstay for publishing fixed data and for interactive investigations. So printed reports or published fixed reports is what we used to publish. Time-stamped information out was pushed to a lot of people, and OLAP analysis is what we gave to people to do an ad hoc analysis.

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