• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Infor Gives BI Tool the 10x Treatment

    July 16, 2013 Alex Woodie

    Infor last week unveiled the 10x release of Infor BI, a business intelligence suite that includes an in-memory OLAP database. The new release brings all of the apparatus associated with Infor 10x, including a shiny new SoHo user interface, mobile capabilities, and hooks into the Ming.le social platform. The company is also close to announcing integration of Infor BI into SkyVault.

    Infor BI is based on the MIS product formerly sold by Systems Union, a German software company that Infor acquired in 2006 for about $200 million. Infor has about 3,000 customers for MIS (also called Decision Ware), mostly small and midsize businesses in Europe, but also some in North America and the Asia-Pacific region.

    Incidentally, Infor BI is not a Microsoft SQL Server-based product, as the company said it would create back in 2010, when it committed itself to making Microsoft Windows and related database and middleware products the primary, top-tier platforms for its software. Charles Phillips took over Infor about four months later, and the Microsoft and Windows push was soon dropped.

    The Windows-based Infor BI suite has several components, including the in-memory OLAP database, a simplified Web front end for reporting and analysis, a more powerful Excel-based interface, a dedicated interface for dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs), a financial and operational planning tool, a financial consolidation tool, a statistical package, and a data import tool.

    With the 10x release (officially version 10.4.1), Infor has made changes around the look and feel of the product with the SoHo branding. Reworking the interfaces into the SoHo scheme also entails support for the Ming.le social platform, which gives users new ways to interact with data uncovered by the tool.

    It has also delivered some functional enhancements that go beyond aesthetics and usability. On the mobile front, the new Infor Motion and BI Dashboards component gives users the capability to consume dashboards from the comfort of a Web browser or an iPad, which will be very beneficial to road warriors and other mobile workers who want quick access to data without having to lug around the laptop. The Motion app is available for download from the Apple App Store.

    The Motion and BI Dashboards also bolsters user self-service by giving them the capability to create their own charts and tables, and then mash them up into a dashboard. Infor says the Motion and BI Dashboards offering shares the same architecture and is closely integrated with content in Application Studio, the primary Web-based front end for creating reports and dashboards in Infor BI.

    Infor has also hooked its Business Vault into its BI tool with the 10x (10.4.1) release. Business Vault is the Windows-based operational data store for data that’s pushed out of enterprise applications by its ION middleware. As ION moves transactions–in the OAGI business object document (BOD) standard–into the Business Vault, the data is made available to Infor BI.

    The new SoHo user interface is designed to make Infor BI easier and more intuitive to use.

    Business Vault is a good fit for Infor BI and its OLAP capabilities, says Lee Kilmer, a vice president of product strategy and development for enterprise performance management, business intelligence solutions, and Lawson. “It’s receiving information that’s published from the application,” he says. “It provides modeling and shredding capabilities, and will push that information into OLAP cubes that people can use for hierarchical analysis and slicing and dicing.”

    Because Infor BI caches data in memory and calculates it on the fly, as requested by the user, it eliminates the need to pre-aggregate the data, which keeps the memory footprint as small as possible, thereby boosting performance, Kilmer says.

    This release also brings support for the R statistical package, providing more advanced analytic and forecasting capabilities. Kilmer says results from R analysis will be visible right in line with other information presented to the user.

    Infor is also working on hooking Infor BI into Infor SkyVault, which the company announced earlier this year at Inforum 2013. SkyVault is based on Amazon RedShift, an online, multi-node, column-oriented database used to house big data.

    The idea is to use SkyVault as a data store for content (reports, dashboards, KPIs, etc.) developed with Infor BI. Infor hasn’t announced the certification of SkyVault and Infor BI, but expects to in the near future, Kilmer says.

    RELATED STORIES

    Infor Commits Itself to Microsoft and Windows Technologies

    Infor Exudes Total Confidence At Annual User Confab

    Infor Taps Ex-Oracle Prez Phillips as its New CEO



                         Post this story to del.icio.us
                   Post this story to Digg
        Post this story to Slashdot

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags:

    Sponsored by
    Midrange Dynamics North America

    Git up to speed with MDChange!

    Git can be lightning-fast when dealing with just a few hundred items in a repository. But when dealing with tens of thousands of items, transaction wait times can take minutes.

    MDChange offers an elegant solution that enables you to work efficiently any size Git repository while making your Git experience seamless and highly responsive.

    Learn more.

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Sponsored Links

    Linoma Software:  FREE Webinar: Conquer Compliance Requirements. July 18.
    Cybernetics:  Ditch the tape backup? Up to 4.3 TB/hr! Start saving now!
    Abacus Solutions:  Qualified IBM i users eligible for free pair of running shoes

    More IT Jungle Resources:

    System i PTF Guide: Weekly PTF Updates
    IBM i Events Calendar: National Conferences, Local Events, and Webinars
    Breaking News: News Hot Off The Press
    TPM @ The Reg: More News From ITJ EIC Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Two Decades Later, Microsoft Looks Like Big Blue Of Days Gone By IBM’s Systems Biz Returns To Profitability In Q2

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Volume 13, Number 20 -- July 16, 2013
THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY:

Profound Logic Software
Abacus Solutions
Townsend Security
Shield Advanced Solutions
Cybernetics

Table of Contents

  • Curbstone Revamps Card Payment Software to Avoid PCI Exposure
  • Infor Gives BI Tool the 10x Treatment
  • IEC Protects Internal Systems with Valid Authentication
  • Spinnaker Nabs More JD Edwards Customers, Unveils Siebel Support Service
  • Townsend Gets VMware Certification for Encryption Key Manager
  • Brooks Revs RPM to Bolster Production Printing
  • Wayne Madden Hooks Up with iFD to Sell TEMBO Database Tools
  • ERP Vendors Delivering Better Value, Nucleus Says
  • Informatica Embeds PowerCenter into Zettaset’s Hadoop Software
  • Liaison Grows EDI VAN Services Business, Thanks to VAN Consolidator

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon
  • COMMON Youth Movement Continues at POWERUp 2025
  • IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11
  • Eradani Uses AI For New EDI And API Service
  • Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D
  • FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?
  • Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts
  • Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
  • Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 20

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle