Immediate Insight

Companies are demanding scalable business-intelligence tools that deliver information in real time. Information Builders Inc. this week will release a new version of its WebFocus software with enhancements that meet those needs, plus new data-analysis, financial-reporting, and information-integration capabilities.

The goal is to give managers greater insight into their companies' finances and business processes at a time when efficiency and tight financial management are critical. "It's the reason business-intelligence sales have done relatively well during the slowdown," Meta Group analyst David Folger says.

WebFocus 5 provides closed-loop analysis capabilities that let users initiate action from within WebFocus-generated reports based on the information they contain. So, for instance, a user could reallocate finished-goods inventory using a report that indicates changes in sales patterns.

The software also offers new forecasting and percentile-segmentation analytical capabilities, as well as the ability to access data in Essbase multidimensional databases. WebFocus 5 can produce reports with fully formatted Excel spreadsheets that include formulas and calculations. New financial reporting and report-archiving capabilities will aid companies wrestling with stricter reporting requirements and shareholder scrutiny of corporate finances.

WebFocus 5 is Java-based with a multithreaded architecture, providing better load-balancing and clustering support than earlier versions. The tool's data extraction, transformation, and loading software is now built into WebFocus for better performance, and its new thin-client architecture makes deployment to thousands of users easier. A new Web-based management console simplifies management on multiple platforms. Pricing starts at $18,000.