InetSoft's Ad Hoc Reporting Software

Reporting has always been tightly coupled to everyday business activities. As a result, reporting requirements tend to change very often. Traditionally, when such changes occurred, you were forced to rely on developers or IT staff to revise your reports to meet the new requirements.

However, because developers often do not correctly anticipate the needs of report users, the resulting report designs are often inadequate, requiring further iteration and re-implementation.

InetSoft believes the solution to this problem is user empowerment. Instead of requiring you to communicate your needs to developers and then iterate over successive changes, Style Intelligence gives you direct access to powerful “ad hoc reporting” tools that allow you to rapidly and easily design your reports yourself.

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How InetSoft is Different

Other BI tools have previously attempted to provide ad hoc reporting. However, these tools have not reached a significant level of prevalence due to the following factors:

Business reports are complex. Report writers are often large applications that have a steep learning curve.
Business information is complex. Report writers often require that you understand the database query language and know how the data is stored.

Style Intelligence solves both these problems. It addresses the first with an Ad Hoc tool that is lightweight, web-based, and easy to use. It addresses the second by automatically handling all the technical details of accessing data.

InetSoft Viewpoint

"We have observed how our customers approach BPM needs in general. They typically have two approaches to address this. One is they get a BPM suite. That is software that they would deploy into the different departments. Then the second way that they do that is to customize the different components that go into an enterprise business intelligence solution.

And a lot of those components are coming from their existing business applications. Those are either transactional or more strategic. Then they need something to string all those components together. Many times, the suite product they use still addresses only some requirements of a particular department or process, but does not usually fulfill all of the requirements across an enterprise.

In terms of operational business intelligence, then this really becomes a huge win, to pull all of these components together. The key capabilities we have seen customers demand, having to do with accessing multiple data sources, calls for a solution termed data mashup.

In our particular BI technology architecture, our solution is based on Data Block technology. This Data Block data mashup capability allows users, in a very dynamic way, to pull data together from different data sources. And right in the middle of their application or business process, they can utilize that information to answer dynamic questions that arise in day to day work.

Why this enterprise mashup capability is so critical is because we have learned the business processes are all very dynamic. You have most of them set up so you can have a consistency. But nonetheless, problems arise when you have exceptions – a new product is added, a new supplier comes on line, et cetera. Those things happen all the time." - Luke Liang, CEO, InetSoft