Future-Proof Your Data Strategy With LANSA BI

July 22, 2024 Stephen Strake

Last October, with no warning at all, IBM suddenly pulled the plug on its Db2 Web Query business intelligence tool for the IBM i platform. This left a lot of customers in the lurch, since Db2 Web Query is based on but very different from the WebFOCUS business intelligence tool from Information Builders.

IBM and Information Builders, we later learned, could not come to terms on how to re-license the WebFOCUS engine at the heart of Db2 Web Query, and thus far, IBM has not provided an alternative BI platform or a migration tool for any third-party applications.

The upshot is, no matter what, IBM i shops that have been dependent on Db2 Web Query for automating their business intelligence queries and for providing dashboards of business activity for executives and other managers have no choice but to start over with a new BI tool.

And thus there has never been a better time to take a look at LANSA BI.

LANSA, as is well known in the IBM i community, has been providing low-code application development tools for IBM i and OS/400 shops long before low-code was mainstreamed a few years ago. Because of the success of the LANSA tools, LANSA launched LANSA BI as a new product, an alternative to Db2 Web Query and other BI tools used across IBM i, Windows Server, and Linux platforms.

LANSA BI, which is written in Java, has tight IBM i integration and a front end that will be more familiar to IBM i shops. The LANSA analytics tool is analogous to having the WebFOCUS analytics engine inside of Db2 Web Query, and just like IBM provided hooks into the IBM i platform and its files and databases. The result is that LANSA BI looks as native to IBM i as Db2 Web Query ever did.

At the moment, LANSA BI is supported on Windows Server and Linux platforms, including Linux on Power, and LANSA is considering supporting LANSA BI natively on IBM i.

A Solid Analytics Foundation Without Licensing Issues

When IBM announced Db2 Web Query for IBM i back in 2007, it wanted to find a replacement for the legacy, greenscreen Query/400 tool that dated back to the late 1980s with the launch of the venerable AS/400 platform. Rather than start from scratch and create an analytics engine and dashboarding and reporting overlays, Big Blue worked out a deal with Information Builders to use its WebFOCUS tool as the foundation of Db2 Web Query.

The simple fact is that there was always a risk that IBM and Micro Focus might not agree about licensing, and when TIBCO Software bought Information Builders in October 2020, the clock was ticking even if we didn’t know it.

The question now, then, is how does LANSA BI stack up against IBM’s former Db2 Web Query for IBM i? Let’s take a look:

As you can see, LANSA BI can do the same data integration with IBM i and create the same kind of dashboards and visual and tabular reports that Db2 Web Query could do, but it does a lot more than that, too.

One of the key differentiators with the LANSA BI is called data stories, which is a kind of collaborative report – more of a narrative, really – that is based on up-to-the-minute data culled from the IBM i platform that is meant to be shared with everyone in the business so they can understand what is going on with the company. LANSA BI also has artificial intelligence extensions and embedded analytics functions that can automatically find important trends and anomalies in your business data. And finally, LANSA BI supports natural language queries – meaning you talk to it in English rather than SQL to ask a question about your data – which further democratizes access to insights within your company.

The other important thing to consider as you replace Db2 Web Query for IBM i is that you need a business intelligence tool that can aggregate and consolidate information from disparate mission-critical systems and the databases that your company very likely also has in the datacenter – the two important sources being Microsoft SQL Server databases and Oracle databases. LANSA BI can do this, while Db2 Web Query for IBM i could not. LANSA BI can talk to any database source that speaks JDBC, ODBC, JNDI, or XMLA OLAP, and it can even hook into SAP HANA in-memory databases, Hadoop analytics clusters over Hive, and has API connections available for free that link it to Salesforce, Google Analytics, Zendesk, Facebook, and other data-creating platforms that are important for business.

So when you look at it this way, IBM pulling the plug on Db2 Web Query for IBM i might be one of the best things that happens for your data strategy, because the combination of Yellowfin and LANSA BI is much more powerful.

Stephen Strake serves as the General Manager at LANSA, a leader in software development tools and enterprise applications. He is recognized for his strategic vision, integrating advanced technologies to boost efficiency and competitiveness. Under his leadership, LANSA has been serving the market globally, delivering solutions that align with modern business needs.

This content is sponsored by LANSA.

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