Short List: Performance Management; Searching Tools

Cartesis Analytics 3.5

Performance management applications are critical in the CFO's office, but organizations are increasingly interested in sharing trusted information throughout the enterprise. Cartesis Analytics 3.5 brings dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), scorecards and Web- and Excel-based analysis capabilities to the Cartesis 10 performance management suite. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Cartesis has embedded and integrated proven data-visualization technologies from Panorama Software. The upgrade offers a variety of drill-down and drill-through options as well as exception-monitoring capabilities to spot trends and events. Cartesis Analytics is based on Microsoft SQL 2005 and will ship in November.

KCI Control 8.8

More data, more users--that's the current theme in corporate performance management, and KCI Computing says the latest update of its Control platform responds by pushing more computation onto the RDBMS, providing "shorter waits for data-intensive views and faster execution of transformations, mappings and allocations." Control's just-in-time recalculations have been extended to work with any depth of mapped models, automatically tracking which blocks of stored calculated values are affected by updates and only recalculating outdated data. To support more users without additional licensing expense, the upgrade has a new Publish feature that outputs to Excel workbooks, CSV, HTML, XML and PDF.

Endeca Information Access Platform 5.0

IAP version 5.0 from search vendor Endeca Technologies adds entity extraction, which automatically recognizes people, places and organizations in text, and term discovery, which finds phrases such as "interest rate" and "Federal Reserve." To improve interoperability, there are new adaptors for software, such as EMC's Documentum, IBM's WebSphere Product Center and Salesforce.com, and platform support has been extended to Solaris 10, Red Hat 4 and .Net 2.0. To improve the power-user experience, Endeca has added workflow that automates approvals for features like content spotlighting (which highlights best-selling or reduced-price products, for example). Also new are interface upgrades, including "tag cloud," which presents extracted terms in varying font sizes and colors depending on frequency or relevance, and concept clustering, which lets users group ideas on an ad hoc basis.