Information Builders Innovates in Data Visualization and Operational Intelligence

Information Builders announced two major new products at its recent annual user summit. The first was InfoDiscovery, a tool for ad hoc data analysis and visual discovery. The second was iWay Sentinel, which allows administrators to manage applications in a proactive and dynamic manner. Being a privately held company, Information Builders is not a household name, but it is a major provider of highly scalable business intelligence (BI) and information management software to companies around the world.

This year’s announcements come one year after the release of WebFOCUS 8.0, which I wrote about at the time. Version 8.0 of this flagship BI product includes a significant overhaul of the underlying code base, and its biggest change is how it renders graphics by putting the parameters of the HTML5 graph code directly inside the browser. This approach allows consistent representation of the business intelligence graphics in multiple device environments including mobile ones. Our research into information optimization shows that mobile technology improves business performance significantly in one out of three organizations. The graphics capability helped Information Builders earn the rating of Hot vendor in our latest Value Index on Mobile Business Intelligence. It is an increasingly important trend to combine analytics with transactional systems in a mobile environment. Our research shows that mobile business intelligence is advancing quickly. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of participants said they expect their mobile workforce to have BI capabilities in the next 12 months.

WebFOCUS InfoDiscovery represents the company’s new offer in the self-service analytics market. For visual discovery it enables users to extract, blend and prepare data from various data sources such as spreadsheets, company databases and third-party sources. Once the analytic data set is created, users can drill down into the information in an underlying columnar database. They can define queries as they go and examine trends, correlations and anomalies in the data set. Users given permission can publish the visualization from their desktop to the server for others to view or build further. Visualization is another area of increasing importance for organizations. Our research on big data analytics said data visualization has a number of benefits; the most-often cited are faster analytics (by 49%), understanding content (48%), root-cause analysis (40%) and displaying multiple result sets at the same time (40%).

InfoDiscovery is Information Builders’ contender in the new breed of visual discovery products. The first generation of visual discovery products drew attention for their visual capabilities, ease of use and agility. More recently, established business intelligence vendors, of which Information Builders is one, have focused on developing visual discovery tools on the platform of their well-known BI products, with the aim of taking advantage of their maturity. Currently this second wave of tools is still behind the first in terms of ease of use and visual analysis but are advancing rapidly, and they can provide better data governance, version control, auditing and user security. For instance, InfoDiscovery uses the same metadata as the enterprise platform WebFOCUS 8 so objects from both InfoDiscovery and other WebFOCUS applications can be configured in the same user portal. When a business user selects a filter, the data updates across all the components in the dashboard. The HTML5 rendering engine, new in WebFOCUS 8.0, makes the dashboard available to various devices including tablets and smartphones.

The other major announcement at the conference, iWay Sentinel, is a real-time application monitoring tool that helps administrators manage resources across distributed systems. It works with iWay Service Manager, which is used to manage application workflows. IWay Sentinel allows multiple instances of Service Manager to be viewed and managed from a single Web interface, and administrators can address bottlenecks in system resources both manually and automatically. The tool belongs in the category we call operational intelligence and as our research finds, activity and event monitoring is the most important use (for 62% of research participants), followed by alerting and notification.

Sentinel is an important product in the Information Builders portfolio for a couple of reasons. Tactically speaking, it enables large organizations that are running multiple implementations of iWay Service Manager to manage infrastructure resources in a flexible and streamlined manner. From a strategic perspective, it ties the company to the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), which connects devices and real-time application workflows across a distributed environment. In such an environment, rules and processes flows must be monitored and coordinated in real time. Information is passed along an enterprise service bus that enables synchronous interaction of various application components. The use of IoT is in multiple areas such as remote management of devices, telematics and fleet management, predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and utlilities monitoring. The challenge is that application software is often complex and its processes are interdependent. For this reason, most approaches to the IoT have been proprietary in nature. Even so, Information Builders has a large number of clients in various industries, especially retail, that may be interested in its approach.

Information Builders continues to innovate in the changing IT industry and business demand for analytics and data, building on its integration capabilities and its core business intelligence assets. The breadth and depth of its software portfolio enable the company to capitalize on these assets as demand shifts. For instance, temporal analysis is becoming more important; Information Builders has built that capability into its products for years. In addition, the company’s core software is hardened by years of meeting high-concurrency needs. Companies that have thousands of users need this type of scalable, battle-tested system.

Both iWay Sentinel and InfoDiscovery are in limited release currently and will be generally available later this year. Users of other Information Builders software should examine InfoDiscovery and assess its fit in their organizations. For business users it offers a self-service approach on the same platform as the WebFOCUS enterprise product. IT staff can uphold their governance and system management responsibilities through visibility and flexible control of the platform. For its part iWay Sentinel should interest companies that have to manage multiple instances of information applications and use iWay Service Manager. In particular, retailers, transportation companies and healthcare companies exploring IoT uses should consider how it can help.

Information Builders is exploiting the value of data into what is called information optimization for which they are finding continued growth in providing information applications that meet specific business and process needs. Information Builders is also beginning to further exploit the big data sources and mobile technology areas but will need to further invest to ensure it can be part of a spectrum of new business needs. I continued to recommend any company that must serve a large set of employees in the workforce and has a need for blending data and analytics for business intelligence or information needs to consider Information Builders.

Regards,

Ventana Research

SAS Helps Manage Interactions and Gain Insights on Customers

By its own admission, SAS has a very large software portfolio (of more than 250 individual products), and it continues to develop and release more products and updates to existing ones. Some of the products are sold alone, and others are bundled into “enterprise solutions”. Some are for technical users, and others are business applications. This complexity can make it hard to identify which product or bundle serves a particular need. Three are most relevant to my research practice: Customer Intelligence (CI), which I wrote about after attending the 2013 SAS European analysts event; SAS Visual Analytics; and a new one, the Customer Decision Hub that SAS has developed to support multichannel customer engagement.

When I last wrote about Customer Intelligence I noted that it was designed mainly to process structured customer data (such as found in CRM and ERP applications and customer data warehouses) and the analysis it generated was largely for use in marketing. At this year’s analyst event SAS highlighted several developments, but most are to support marketing better, although some directly impact customer engagement. One of the challenges in understanding CI is that it is a bundle of 11 products, and that doesn’t include products that are part of the underlying SAS technology platform. Of the 11 business applications, six relate directly to marketing, and one, SAS Profitability Management, allows companies to understand and manage profitability at a detailed level. The remaining four products relate more to customer engagement: SAS Customer Link Analytics (designed to identify the communities in which customers interact), Real-Time Decision Manager (to deliver personalized offers derived from rules-based analytics), Adaptive Customer Experience (to create profiles of customers based on interactions and other customer data) and Social Media Analytics (to view and analyze customer activity on social media). Collectively the CI bundle of products supports the end-to-end marketing process, but a lot of the capabilities also relate to sales and customer service. The issue for potential customers thus becomes which of the products directly serve their business objectives and what impact picking among them has on pricing, implementation and ongoing operations.

SAS Visual Analytics is a product that makes it possible for business users to create and run their own analytics. This is especially relevant in the contact center and customer service business units. My benchmark research into next-generation customer analytics shows that unlike most other business units, these tend not to have data scientists or analysts to help them produce analysis of customer-facing activities. Instead they rely on managers to produce their own reports and analysis, and as the research shows, they rely heavily on spreadsheets to do this. After IT sets up access to the right data stores, Visual Analytics helps business users create their own analysis requirements and run these against the data sources to produce the analysis and metrics they need. It thus enables managers to keep up with the ever increasing demands of customers and to base decisions on the most up-to-date information, without having to rely so much on IT assistance.

My benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows that customer engagement is a multichannel task that is carried out by multiple business units, which CI and Visual Analytics both support. Companies thus need to recognize that customer engagement is a cross-business responsibility that should be based on a single view of the customer, be rules-based to ensure consistency and the best possible outcomes, and should use multiple forms of analytics, on all sources of customer data, to provide the analysis and metrics to monitor and assess past performance and influence future actions. My benchmark research into next-generation customer analytics shows that many businesses have not made this transition yet and still rely on tools not suited for these tasks. The most common tool (used by 52% of companies) to monitor and assess customer-related activities is spreadsheets; only 26 percent have deployed a dedicated customer analytics tool. While spreadsheets have their place, they cannot process unstructured data and cannot work in real time to provide advice such as next best actions a contact center agent should take while talking to a customer.

To meet these requirements SAS has developed its Customer Decision Hub. This bundle of products can help businesses achieve an omni-channel experience ­– that is, consistent, personalized and in-context experiences at all touch points. It includes APIs that allow businesses to capture all customer interactions in real time or batches, regardless of channel, including unstructured interactions such as calls, email, text messages and social media posts. The hub can also capture data about marketing, sales, service and other ad hoc actions. It uses this data to produce analyses, insights and metrics about those actions, put them in context and show history, risks and potential opportunities. The hub also has a rules engine that can recommend actions and the channel through which to communicate with the customer; among the focus of rules are priorities, strategy, constraints, customer preferences, channel restrictions, budgets and contact permissions. The optimization engine is set up using SAS CI Studio, which uses drag-and-drop techniques to create intelligent, rules-driven workflows to create more relevant, personalized customer experiences. The hub thus links external, customer-related interactions and internal processes to provide the analysis and orchestrate actions.

This combination of products, if used properly, could help companies improve customer experiences that cross the boundaries between marketing, sales and service. However, as with CI the Decision Hub includes many applications and capabilities, and much of SAS’s messaging relates to marketing, which I don’t believe does the package justice. Potential customers should make the effort to understand what products are included in Decision Hub, what is involved in running it and the impact it is likely to have across the organization.

One of the strengths of SAS is its range of products, but this can also be a weakness. In their own right, each product supports a robust set of capabilities, but choosing the right set to meet a specific business need seems to be a complex process that often involves third-party consulting services. My colleagues wrote about SAS recently on its focus on business analytics and it work to unify big data across business and IT that also demonstrate how they are bringing many products to a singular focus for business and IT. Also in my view both SAS CI and the Customer Decision Hub focus too much on marketing and not for use across the business. Anything to do with customers is an enterprise issue, not a departmental one. Improving the customer experience is now such a critical issue that companies should look beyond some of the marketing messages and carefully evaluate how SAS can support their customer interaction and overall engagement efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director