Hyperion Announces System 9 Smart Space
Hyperion, a provider of business performance management software, has announced Hyperion System 9 Smart Space, which is described by the company as the industry's first composite application environment for delivering "always-on" business intelligence (BI) to users throughout the enterprise via the Windows desktop. "This is about bringing business intelligence to the 80 percent of potential users in the organization," Tobin Gilman, senior director of product marketing at Hyperion, told 5 Minute Briefing. "This is a huge step in bringing BI into the world of the everyday knowledge worker."
With Smart Space, Gilman noted, the familiarity of Windows is combined with the powerful service-oriented architecture (SOA) of Hyperion System 9. "This is a whole new user experience," he explained. Gilman described "always-on" business intelligence as a system that proactively pushes information to the user. Once the user logs onto Windows, information transparently flows to "gadgets" from Hyperion System 9 Services. Users get key performance indicators and documents at their fingertips.
The gadgets, he continued, present a subset of the functionality of Hyperion System 9. The ability to customize these gadgets enables users to personalize the way they find and use information based on their business needs. "These gadgets are unique to the individual. They can assemble their own personally-tailored applications," he said
Smart Space also features collaboration functionality, enabling users to easily share business intelligence. This shared decision-making environment is powered by auditable instant messaging that operates behind the firewall. Conversations can be saved and associated with business decisions. For more information about Hyperion, click here.
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Information Builders Release DataMigrator 7.1; Service Manager 5.5
Information Builders, the business intelligence company, and its subsidiary iWay Software, a provider of enterprise integration solutions, have announced the release of DataMigrator 7.1 and Service Manager 5.5 as part of a joint organizational roadmap for customer-facing, BI-related data integration issues. Information Builders and iWay Software have outlined six data integration strategies for business intelligence under which new product releases, including the new versions of DataMigrator and Service Manager, will focus upon.
"People are looking to fit all the pieces of their IT infrastructure together in a way that makes sense to their business," Jake Frievald, vice president of product marketing at iWay Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. This requires more emphasis on the link between business intelligence and integration.
DataMigrator, iWay's ETL tool, which supports both traditional batch and trickle-feed ETL for real-time data updates, now features improved support for data definition, custom process definitions, and metadata management from the Web console. Easier graphical joint definitions, project management through application directories and filtering, and support for disparate data sources and non-table sources are also new. Service Manager 5.5 provides significant improvements to the usability of the tool for service-oriented architecture projects. "This allows you to embed more intelligence in your business processes and service-oriented architecture," Frievald noted. "This is a crossover that has not been explored sufficiently yet," he added. "But it is where we see the industry moving. There needs to be more emphasis on the link between BI and integration." For more information on Information Builders, go here.
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Sybase iAnywhere Announces RFID Anywhere 3.0
Sybase iAnywhere announced the latest version of RFID Anywhere, the company's software infrastructure for developing and managing RFID solutions. RFID Anywhere 3.0 introduces a context-aware location information system that allows businesses to track assets from a range of data collection points along with associated environmental inputs and location data.
According to Marty Mallick, director of RFID and Mobile Solutions at Sybase iAnywhere, adding context to the location data - for example, temperature or humidity - enhances the business intelligence aspects of asset tracking. "This is where the real value is," he told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview.
In addition, RFID Anywhere 3.0 Location Information System (LIS) exposes its feature set via a service-oriented architecture (SOA) Web services layer, allowing organization to easily transform static business information into business-aware intelligence. "This is where we see the next stage of asset tracking going," Mallick remarked.
The new LIS supports passive RFID, active RFID, real-time location systems, barcode, global positioning systems, and environmental sensors. "You need to support a broad range of mechanisms for gathering data to deliver this type of solution," Mallick noted. "Companies also want to be able to incorporate different technologies." RFID Anywhere 3.0 will be available this month. To learn more about the new features, go here.
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Business Objects Nabs Nsite Software for SaaS
Business Objects has acquired Nsite Software, Inc., a California-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. The acquisition gives Business Objects access to the company's on-demand application platform, engineering talent experienced in building and managing SaaS offerings, and approximately 27,000 current Nsite subscribers. Business Objects plans to use the platform to build and offer customizable on-demand BI applications that integrate multiple data sources, such as information from ERP, CRM, and other information systems. Utilizing the Nsite platform, Business Objects expects to introduce additional on-demand BI solutions in 2007.
"SaaS is changing the software market and the acquisition of Nsite is a big step forward for Business Objects in opening up this important new market to business intelligence," Steven Lucas, vice president of strategic markets at Business Objects, remarked about the deal. The Nsite platform provides drag-and-drop functionality and utilizes asynchronous Java and XML (AJAX) technology. The platform is also integrated with salesforce.com customer relationship management solutions, and includes a wizard for building easy point-and-click Web services integrations to other applications. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. For more information, click here.
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Informatica to Acquire Itemfield
In a deal valued at $55 million, Informatica Corp., a leading provider of data integration software, has announced its intent to acquire Itemfield, a vendor delivering data transformation technology that enables near-universal access to unstructured and semi-structured data. "They have unique data transformations for semi-structured and unstructured data," said Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO of Informatica, during a Webcast when the deal was announced. "The combination of Informatica and Itemfield will offer the most comprehensive data integration platform with near-universal access to integrate unstructured, semi-structured and structured data," he added.
Unstructured data includes content-authored data using personal productivity products such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat. Over 80 percent of data within enterprises is estimated to be in a broad array of such unstructured formats, including Microsoft Word and Excel as well as Adobe PDF file formats. Semi-structured data includes a variety of industry-specific XML-based data exchange standards such as SWIFT for international funds transfer by financial institutions and HL7 for patient clinical data records by healthcare institutions. These semi-structured data exchange formats facilitate communication and collaboration between enterprises.
According to Abbasi, Itemfield technology offers access to a broader range of data formats; is more flexible; and includes a wider array of data exchange standards than competitive technology. Moreover, he said, both developers and business users can use it. Itemfield has ongoing relationships with companies like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and webMethods, which Abassi believes Informatica will be able to maintain and expand. For more information, visit here.
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Savvion Announces Savvion BusinessManager 7.0
Savvion has introduced Savvion BusinessManager 7.0, the latest version of its business process management suite (BPMS). Savvion BusinessManager 7.0 is intended to make it easy for everyone in an organization to create, manage, and optimize business processes across the entire lifecycle. "Savvion BusinessManager 7.0 is focused on helping business people articulate and share their ideas," Rob Risany, director of product marketing, Savvion, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Among the highlights of the new release is a feature called Abstract Modeling, which allows business people to model their processes without having intimate knowledge of how process execution and application design works. Additional capabilities that are critical at the design time are focused on helping businesses extend their solutions across not just their functional silos, but also to their trading partners and their extended business value chain, said Risany. "That's why we have supported comprehensive Web services security. That is very important for organizations that are pursuing services-oriented architectures."
On the runtime side, "We have introduced personalized dashboards that give business people the ability to change their experiences on the fly following a motif such as, say, Google Desktop," said Risany. "Instead of constantly having to go back to the IT well every time people want to look at information slightly differently or they want to reorganize the way their interface works, they can do that themselves." Savvion BusinessManager 7.0 will be generally available December 15. The Savvion Process Modeler is available for download here. For more on Savvion, go here.
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Syncsort Releases Version 3.0 of DMExpress
Syncsort has released a new version of DMExpress, a high-performance solution that speeds up data-intensive applications. DMExpress addresses the data management and performance challenges companies face in areas such as data warehousing, changed data capture, Web log processing, data mining, business intelligence, and customer relationship management. According to Syncsort, companies experiencing rapid data growth are seeing a need for faster processing, and with DMExpress 3.0, the company has made improvements for customers that will result in faster applications, minimized elapsed time, and the ability to use real-time data.
DMExpress 3.0 extends 64-bit support to Windows. "We continue to look for opportunities in our join function and our aggregation function. Both of those functions are heavily used in data warehousing applications," Harvey Tessler, director of marketing, Syncsort, told 5 Minute Briefing. In DMExpress 3.0, a high-performance join feature improves the efficiency of preprocessing, retrieval, and updating of large volumes of data, and the addition of high-performance aggregation simplifies the creation, administration, and execution of aggregation jobs. These improvements result in faster processing of larger amounts of data, which in turn allows users to evaluate mission-critical information in a timelier manner, according to the company.
Advances also have been made in DMExpress' GUI. Record-mapping and data-sampling enable users to automatically build record layouts and preview source and target data. Jobs within jobs and direct flow editing provide more versatility in defining more robust applications, and any function can be created using the comprehensive expression builder. For more details on DMExpress 3.0, go here.
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Covelight and Coral8 Announce Strategic Alliance
Covelight Systems, innovator of real-time, application-independent online management solutions, and Coral8 Inc., a provider of complex event processing (CEP) software, have formed a strategic alliance to jointly deliver a platform for the real-time capture and processing of online data and Internet application events. Through the partnership, Covelight and Coral8 will offer an event stream adapter between Covelight's FraudProbe and the Coral8 CEP engine. Customers will be able to seamlessly build and deploy CEP applications on this integrated platform that can analyze high-volume, real-time Internet events. "Putting our companies together and offering a new type of solution to approach problems like online fraud is a great opportunity." Garth Somerville, CTO of Covelight, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview.
"The bad guys are getting a lot smarter in their attacks," Terry Cunningham, CEO of Coral8, added. "More sophisticated monitoring is required. What we're bringing to market will allow customers to quickly adapt to these attacks and shut them down. The combined platform can provide deep visibility into online operational data, including network-level, HTTP, and business-level events - as well as being able to support sophisticated event processing and correlation. "Web logs and application logs simply do not have enough information in them to do the required detection," Somerville explained. "You need to have deep visibility. You also need a single, centralized point of capture for this data." For more information about Coral 8, click here. More information on Covelight is here.
In related news, Coral8 just announced support and tight integration between its CEP engine and IBM DB9 and WebSphere MQ. The Coral8 Engine Version 4.4 with database and native XML processing integration with DB2 9 is currently available. The Coral8 WebSphere MQ adapter will be available in fourth quarter 2006.
"Delivering high-performance event-driven applications requires optimized integration between infrastructure software components," Cunningham commented. "DB2 9, with its pure XML and data warehousing features, and WebSphere MQ represent market-leading software with which our customers want close integration." For more information, click here.
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