Information Builders (IBI) was highest ranked vendor in Ventana Research’s Business Intelligence Value Index for 2012. The combination of data integration, business analytics, visual and data
At the core of the IBI strategy are its WebFocus 8.0 platform and iWay, its information management suite of software. Our benchmark research into Business Technology Innovation shows that data preparation and quality are critical challenges and time consuming activities impacting analysts in 42 percent of organizations, so information management must be part of any general discussion of business intelligence. The latest release, iWay 7, was announced at the conference. It can integrate more than 300 data sources using prebuilt adapters and handles data preparation and quality and multidomain master data management. Management spun off iWay into a separate operating company but brought it back into the core business recently as executives recognized the trend toward big data and what we call information optimization. The combination of data integration with business intelligence is a critical factor for business intelligence companies in large part because big data integration is essential to big data analytics. The ability to denormalize data and combine diverse data into a wide single view of an analytical data set is an important aspect of big data analytics. Information Builders uses the iWay and a columnar database called Hyperstage running on commodity servers to handle these big data challenges.
The picture of how WebFocus 8 addresses emerging BI trends is becoming clearer. The first of these trends is the necessity for self-
Analytics applied to social media is another hot topic in business, and IBI has made significant advancements with its Social Media Integration application, also part of WebFocus 8. It enables users to examine posts, blogs and other social data to detect patterns in customer opinions. Sentiment algorithms that interpret and quantify the inherent complexities of language are provided as a third-party Web service or a REST adapter. Users can search via the Magnify tool and receive a robust contextual inquiry experience with tag clouds, quantitative information around mentions, and sentiment on a scale from very negative to very positive. Users can assign thresholds based on numeric value and assign appropriate stakeholders to follow up. Many marketing departments are using ad-hoc tools to drive these types of initiatives, but ultimately it makes more sense to place these queries within the context of their business intelligence initiatives; social information alone has limited value, but when married with internal metrics such as customer lifetime value, it has much more impact.
On another increasingly important front, mobile business intelligence ranks as a business priority among the six areas of technology innovation that Ventana Research studies. IBI takes a hybrid HTML5
IBI’s cloud initiative is in the form of platform as a service (PaaS). As opposed to infrastructure as a service or software as a service, PaaS provides both infrastructure and a development environment for BI applications. IBI’s product encompasses service level agreements for testing, validation and production environments with performance tuning, database provisioning and network management. The company has 10 international data centers, which helps to overcome regulatory challenges associated with international data movement. IBI does not have a “pay as you go” usage model but treats it more as a professional service based on assessment. This matches the company’s intended brand image as a service-oriented provider. In the bigger picture of cloud computing, BI is a laggard with only a few percent of participants in our research actually having adopted cloud-based BI. Security and data movement are the biggest perceived obstacles among those organizations.
In the area of predictive analytics, IBI has embedded RStat, which uses the open source R statistical language and can be accessed
In a broader analytics discussion with its product leaders Kevin Quinn and Rado Katorov, an interesting analytic concept that bears on data discovery was revealed. Simpson’s Paradox is the idea that a trend that appears in a single group disappears, and often reverses itself, when combined with other data. For instance, in 1973, the University of California Berkeley was sued for discrimination against women based on the fact that 44 percent of male applicants were admitted but only 35 percent of women were admitted. While the difference is indeed significant, when the data is looked at on a departmental basis, an interesting causal variable emerges. That is, men were applying to the easier programs and women were applying to the more difficult programs. Thus it was concluded that the disparity was not due to discrimination but rather to men who applied to the university that year may simply have been a bit lazier than the women applying. The point for analytics is that many discovery tools in the market today often rely on people to make discoveries based on single groupings of variables, and such discoveries may be misleading or worse. IBI’s approach to this issue is to use data reduction techniques such as cluster analysis that allow the data to group itself in an a-priori manner, thus making it easier for the analyst to recognize important patterns among groups of variables rather than just single variables. In the Berkeley admission example, for instance, IBI’s system presumably would have linked the difficulty of the program with gender, and that insight could perhaps have prevented the lawsuit from even being filed.
In sum, IBI has a strong base in large and midsize companies due to its
Regards,
Tony Cosentino
VP and Research Director