RoamBi Brings Business Intelligence to the iPhone
Mobile BI solution combines iPhone App, SaaS and on-premise offerings. System integrates with SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com.
With its large screen and simple navigation, the iPhone is well suited to delivering charts, graphs and other types of data visualizations. It’s no surprise, then, that several leading business intelligence (BI) software vendors – including Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects and Information Builders – have added the iPhone to their mobile device support lists. The problem, Santiago Becerra contends, is that many of these solutions attempt to shrink reports designed for desktops onto tiny screens.
“The shrink-to-fit approach results in a lot of scrolling up and down, left and right, and shrinking and zooming to try to find the right information,” says Becerra, chairman and co-founder of MeLLmo, which provides the new RoamBi mobile BI system, announced May 19. Combining an iPhone app, a SaaS-based publishing site and an on-premise edition for enterprise deployments, RoamBi is said to offer superior visualization and navigation on the iPhone and an easy way to convert existing reports for mobile delivery.
“Instead of trying to read reports from left to right and top to bottom, as if you’re trying to read a spreadsheet through a straw, RoamBi converts a flat, static report into an interactive mini-analytic application for the iPhone,” Becerra says.
The RoamBi iPhone application, which is available as a free download from the iPhone app store, provides tables, pie charts and other views formatted specifically for the iPhone. By visiting the RoamBi Publisher at www.roambi.com, users can upload Excel spreadsheets, HTML tables, CSV files and Salesforce.com reports and select the styles of visualizations desired. The basic publishing options are free, but MeLLmo says premium SaaS-based services, such as third-party content/development partner offerings, will be launched later this year.
RoamBi Enterprise edition delivers the mobile solution as on-premise software that includes a Web/Flex-based RoamBi Designer and a RoamBi Server. The product currently supports secure, role-specific publishing of data from SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports as well as Microsoft Excel files. RoamBi Enterprise costs $10,000 per server plus $100 per user.
MeLLmo put a lot of emphasis on simplifying report development, so the Designer is said to read and interpret data and metadata and re-create existing reports automatically.
“If the system required users to re-create thousands of reports, it wouldn’t work. So a key goal was to protect investments in existing BI systems,” Becerra explains.
For now, there’s a limit to the specific investments that RoamBi can protect in that it only supports SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com as data sources (beyond standard file formats). Becerra declined to detail what other BI systems the company might support and when those integrations might become available. The company also declined to spell out when RoamBi might support other smartphone platforms such as the RIM BlackBerry.
If Becerra’s track record is any indication, RoamBi is destined for growth. The executive was a co-founder of both Infommersion, which was sold along with its Xcelsius application to BusinessObjects, and Graphical Information, which was sold along with its Balanced Scorecard product to Oracle.
In-Memory BI Upgrades Point to Mainstream User Adoption
Both the TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrade and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release take first-generation in-memory products to a broader base of users.
New integrations, new scalability options and new data visualization options promise to bring TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 to a broader base of potential business intelligence consumers. Announced and released May 18, the 3.0 launch marks the latest in a series of major upgrades since Spotfire’s acquisition by TIBCO nearly two years ago. And like last week’s SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release, the upgrade represents the maturation of a once-nichey in-memory product into a mainstream BI offering.
In contrast to conventional BI tools, which query data on disk, in-memory products load data into random access memory (RAM) so users can quickly query and interact with information without extensive IT performance tuning and data preparation. Spotfire was introduced in the late 1990s as a visual data exploration tool used almost entirely by pharmaceutical and life sciences researchers. As has been the case for other in-memory products, Spotfire’s power and breadth of appeal have increased with the advent of multi-core, multi-threaded and 64-bit server technologies. Since its acquisition by TIBCO in May 2007, Spotfire has been enhanced with operational and predictive analytics, real-time data integrations and data mining capabilities.
The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrades announced today include prebuilt data integrations to SAP BW, SAP R/3, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications and Oracle E-Business Suite, in addition to a new Web services integration option. These connectors not only make it easier to integrate popular data sources, they also open up new data access and analysis options.
“Until recently we’ve been limited to accessing data from relational data sources and file-based locations,” admits TIBCO Spotfire product marketing manager Tim Wormus. “With 3.0 we’re expanding to full enterprise connectivity, and you can also model the data so you can connect multiple sources to build a federated data warehouse or analytics layer.” With Spotfire’s caching support, Wormus says you can pull data from production systems and let users query against the caching layer rather than mission-critical production systems.
Designed to support larger, enterprisewide deployments, the scalability features in the 3.0 release include load balancing and failover support as well as new deployment management and administrative controls. The Web-based configuration controls ease remote administration while the deployment management features simplify migration from development, test and production servers.
New analytics and visualizations introduced in TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 include treemaps, new scatterplots and error bars within bar and line charts that let you see the data behind the visualization. An added visualization toolkit is said to make it easier to build custom visualizations. “This extends our lead in our core competency of visually interactive, real-time analytics,” Wormus says.
The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 release comes less than a week after SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a new product that blends the Internet-search-like Polestar query interface with the in-memory analysis capabilities of SAP’s Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) appliance. Introduced in 2006 as the Business Intelligence Accelerator, the BWA appliance is another in-memory product headed for mainstream use. The accelerated version of Explorer introduced last week is limited to accessing data in SAP BW, but a “second-wave” upgrade set to be introduced late this year or early next year is expected to access myriad data sources.
QlikTech QlikView and IBM Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix TM1) are two other venerable in-memory products. Several leading BI vendors have either recently added (MicroStrategy) or plan to add (Microsoft) in-memory analysis capabilities. Leading in-memory products and benefits were recently covered in “Insight at the Speed of Thought: Taking Advantage of In-Memory Analytics,” an in-depth report available as a free download (registration required) at the Intelligent Enterprise “Next-Era BI Tech Center.”
IBM ‘System S’ Promises New Era of Stream Processing
‘Perpetual analytics’ touted as the dynamic, real-time future of forward-looking analysis.
High-end analytics offer the power to predict, but those predictions may be based on warehouse-resident data that is hours, days or even weeks old. Although complex event processing technologies eliminate the data latency problem, they’re most often deployed in very limited, industry-specific applications. Addressing these shortcomings and hoping to usher in a new era of real-time stream computing, IBM today unveiled today System S, a new platform designed to handle instantaneous analysis of hundreds or even thousands of high-volume data streams.
“We started from scratch and looked at the mathematics of the analytics, the programming language and the way in which applications are structured,” says Nagui Halim, the chief scientist behind System S. “The difference with System S is that the analytics are much more advanced and the applications are much more sophisticated in terms of what you can look at and how you express the programs.”
To be marketed under the product name InfoSphere Streams, System S is designed to support forward-looking “perpetual analytics” based on analysis of up to 6 gigabytes per second or 21,600 gigabytes per hour – the equivalent of all the Web pages on the Internet. What’s more, these analyses are continuously refined and dynamically react as data sources and underlying trends change.
“As the applications are processing, they can change how they operate,” Halim explains. “For example, as streams of data appear or disappear, we can introduce compensating actions and do [data] source selection on the fly. You can also send feedback to earlier parts of an application so it can dynamically tune how it processes the data.”
In development at IBM Research since 2003, System S is said to be both scalable ” from laptops to exotic supercomputers – and broadly applicable to industries such as manufacturing, retail, transportation, finance, and security and surveillance. The sweet spot for deployments will be on commodity clustered servers in the 10- to 50-blade range. The immediate focus will be on many of the same applications targeted by CEP vendors, including trade surveillance, fraud detection, market making and program trading applications at financial institutions.
Among the early beta customers of System S is TD Securities, which is said to be using the technology to ingest more than 5 million bits of trading data per microsecond to make faster financial trading decisions. Uppsala University and the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, meanwhile, are using System S to predict “space weather” such as solar winds that can have an impact on communications, energy transmission over power lines, airline and space travel, and satellites.
System S frees mathematicians to employ sophisticated analytic techniques such as micro clustering or support-vector machine analysis without proprietary restrictions, Halim says. And to allay fears that an entirely new platform might discourage would-be developers, IBM is making System S trial code available at no cost, and it will also offer developer tools, adapters and software for testing applications. The new development language, called Spade, is easy to pick up quickly, Halim says.
“We’ve worked with clients to help them learn the language, and we’ve found that within two to four weeks they can become productive,” Halim says. We haven’t found it to be a big barrier to entry because it employs familiar ways to express how the information is handled.”
IBM also announced today that it will open an IBM European Stream Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland, to provide customer support, testing and research capabilities for prospective European customers.
Oracle Extends Business Intelligence Applications Portfolio
Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics apps round out the ERP- and CRM-integrated portfolio. Oracle stresses fast deployment and ongoing support.
Since acquiring Siebel in early 2006, Oracle has steadily built on that vendor’s collection of Siebel Analytics applications. With today’s 7.9.6 release of what are now called Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, the portfolio gains two more analytics apps as well as additional integrations and upgrades. With each app providing predefined ETL adapters, data warehouse schemas, and dashboards and reports, the appeal for many customers is fast-track deployment and ongoing support.
“These applications give you the technologies you need to pull information from Oracle and non-Oracle sources, do federated queries and present information in the right context,” says John O’Rourke, a vice president of marketing at Oracle. “At least 80 percent of what the customer needs is predefined, and they can then customize the dashboards and add links and metrics. The benefit is not only faster deployment but also lower ongoing cost of ownership, because we’re supporting the applications and keeping them in sync with transaction systems.”
The two new BI Applications are Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics. The first is designed to help companies control project costs and performance by tracking budgets, forecasts, cost, revenue, billing, profitability, agreements, funding and project performance. The application is integrated with the project-management capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise. Government agencies, engineering and construction companies, and professional-services organizations are among the target customers.
The Loyalty Analytics application helps companies measure the effectiveness of customer and partner programs administered within the Siebel Loyalty Management application. “The analytic app lets you extract information out of transactional apps, summarize in a high-level dashboard and then drill down to understand underlying causes behind the trends,” O’Rourke says. “It’s a timely release, in that many companies are trying to maintain existing customers and win new customers in light of the economy.”
Release 7.9.6 also brings enhancements to Oracle’s existing Human Resources Analytics and Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics applications. The HR app gains dashboards for talent management, learning management, recruiting, leave and absenteeism; the Procurement app now offers a Spend Analyzer and new employee expense and enhanced procurement dashboards.
Oracle says more than 2,000 customers use its BI Applications. Rivals including SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and SAS also offer analytic apps, though each with different levels of depth, breadth and support.
IBM Cognos Blueprints, for instance, provide frameworks that help you apply BI to a certain content area, “but they are not supported,” says AMR Research Analyst John Hagerty. “They are not standard products, and you’re on your own in terms of extending them and keeping them in sync with applications.”
SAP BusinessObjects is starting to build out analytic applications as part of its Enterprise Performance Management Framework, and that list includes Spend Analytics and Supply Chain Performance apps. “SAP doesn’t have the same breadth of applications that Oracle offers at this point,” Hagerty says.
SAS, in contrast, offers a range of “very deep and rich analytic applications in specific, industry-driven content areas,” Hagerty explains. Examples include drug discovery, warranty management and environmental impact management, and the apps offer ongoing support.
Meanwhile, observes Hagerty, “What Oracle is doing is more of a broad-brush approach, addressing the main content areas that ERP and CRM systems address.”
Integration with Oracle transactional applications is, indeed, a core appeal of the BI Apps. The 7.9.6 release includes a new integration between the Oracle Financial Analytics app and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management. The release also updates existing integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite (11i10 and R12), PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 and 9.0, and Siebel CRM 8.0 and 8.1.1.
Adoption of the BI Apps has been highest among Oracle’s Siebel and Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition customers, so there’s room for growth across the rest of the application portfolio. “These applications can pull information from legacy apps and even SAP,” Hagerty says. “But practically speaking, the real value is very much geared to extending the Oracle suite of assets.”
