Info Builders Unveils New Solutions at User Conference

June 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

Business intelligence and analytics software maker Information Builders showed off its latest creations at its annual user conference that’s taking place this week in Orlando, Florida. Among the new offerings are solutions designed to help its WebFOCUS customers take advantage of big data, social media, cloud deployments, and Salesforce.com.

On the big data front, Information Builders announced that WebFOCUS can now be deployed with a column-oriented database, which should substantially improve the performance of certain types of analytic workloads that rely on a large number of queries or are accessing large data sets. The vendor said its column-oriented developments are the result of work it did with outside vendors, including 1010data, Teradata, Hewlett-Packard Vertica, and EMC Greenplum.

Information Builders has also adopted column-oriented technology with Hyperstage, which it describes as a query-optimized data store that is embedded into WebFOCUS. The New York City vendor shipped Hyperstage earlier this year.

The vendor also highlighted its support for multi-tenancy in WebFOCUS, a feature it announced earlier this spring. It also announced security and management improvements that should make cloud and SaaS deployments easier to administer. The company also highlighted the fact that WebFOCUS is available through subscription-based pricing, which minimizes startup costs.

The vendor also announced the WebFOCUS Facebook Adapter, which is designed to help customers harvest data contained in public posts on Facebook and incorporate them into existing reports, dashboards, and charts. The new adapter builds on existing social media tools from Information Builders, including recent enhancements to its enterprise search platform, called WebFOCUS Magnify, that allows customers to perform “sentiment analysis” on posts made to social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Information Builders also announced an update to its various adapters that work with Salesforce.com. The vendor says the enhancements will allow WebFOCUS reports and dashboards to be built directly within Salesforce.com. This will enable WebFOCUS to function as if it were a native part of Salesforce.com.

WebFOCUS runs on IBM i and open systems. It also forms the basis for IBM‘s DB2 Web Query. Many features that Information Builders first releases in WebFOCUS eventually make their way into DB2 Web Query.