IBM Updates Alphablox Business Intelligence Software

October 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

IBM last week unveiled a new release of its Alphablox for Linux, Unix, and Windows business intelligence application development software. With Alphablox version 9.5, IBM is now allowing both Java and non-Java developers to build Web-based business intelligence dashboards and scorecard applications. It has also added new features to help developers design, develop, and test their analytic applications, and to help users interact with data and perform calculations.

Alphablox is a collection of business intelligence tools IBM acquired more than three years ago to flesh out its DB2 information management business. Fast development and reusability have always been strong suites of the Alphablox tools, which previously were tightly tied to the J2EE world.

But with version 9.5, IBM has strived to open up Alphablox to a new class of less-technical user. This is the goal of the new Blox Builder environment that debuts with version 9.5 of the tool, which IBM promises provides a J2EE “code free” development environment. Blox Builder functions as a plug-in to Eclipse, the DB2 Warehouse Design Studio, or its Rational Application Developer toolset.

Version 9.5 also adds support for the latest operating systems, databases, application server environments, and Web browsers. It eliminates support for many operating systems, databases, and application server products. The software supports DB2/400 data sources, and is supported in AIX and Linux partitions running on the System i server, and Windows servers running on the platform’s Integrated System x Server (IXS) and Integrated System x Adapter (IXA) environments.

Alphablox for Linux, Unix, and Windows version 9.5 becomes available on October 31.