WebFOCUS, the enterprise BI/Analytics platform from Manhattan-based Information Builders, has been around almost as long as the web browser. It's the product of choice not only for many large, global firms, but also for many small-to-medium sized companies.
It's also my BI tool of choice. Here are a few reasons why I'm confident recommending WebFOCUS.
Powerful yet Easy
WebFOCUS provides features for all BI users, both internal and external to the organization. General business users can have intelligence automatically delivered to them or users can open intuitive "InfoApps" on their desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Power business users can build their own sophisticated BI applications using the InfoAssist tool with browser-based GUI drag-and-drop features and share them with others in the "BI Portal." Hardcore technical developers can build complex enterprise BI applications using the Windows IDE called "App Studio."Scalable
WebFOCUS can scale up, able to run on a variety of platforms based on your current needs. Should your usage volume change, WebFOCUS applications are portable and can be moved up from distributed environments to large mainframes. WebFOCUS can scale out, where servers are organized into load-balanced clusters. Whether you have a small group of twenty users or a global audience of twenty million, WebFOCUS can handle the volume.Any Data Source
Not only can WebFOCUS run on any platform, it has adapters to read practically any data source. Actually, the sources are not even limited to what you would consider "data." Sources can also be applications (e.g., JD Edwards and SAP) and web services (which might be wrappers for programs written in legacy technologies).Sitting on top of the data source is a powerful metadata layer that can contain items such as: user-friendly business names, help comments, calculations (mathematical expressions, string manipulation, IF/THEN/ELSE logic, function calls, SQL expressions, etc.), security rules, relational joins, hierarchy/dimensional grouping, and other important data enhancements.
All WebFOCUS tools use the same metadata layer, giving your organization a single version of the truth in all generated content.
Highly Dynamic, Multi-Step Procedures
The WebFOCUS engine interprets users' requests at runtime. A powerful scripting and symbolic substitution feature allows a single procedure to be dynamically changed into tens of thousands different permutations based on input selections and logical conditions. When I do conversions of other technologies, it is not unusual to convert hundreds of related legacy reports (e.g., those written in SAP BO Crystal Reports or WebI) into one single WebFOCUS procedure.Unlike many BI products, these procedures are not limited to a single data query and formatting step. Instead, WebFOCUS can run sophisticated multi-step processes that branch differently based on user input or specific conditions (such as the day of the week, or whether certain data exist, or whether an event has happened or not).
A WebFOCUS procedure is not limited to just your typical reporting and graphing. Instead, the product provides a full application development language capable of building complex data systems. These BI applications can be extended with other technologies, such as C/C++, Java, R, and Python.
