Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity and integration solutions, today announced the general availability of its WebFOCUS InfoDiscovery offering. The web-based data discovery solution empowers analysts and business users to gain deeper insight from all kinds of data and easily communicate the impact of their findings to help guide actions and decisions. InfoDiscovery debuted at Information Builders’ 2014 Summit User Conference in June and has enjoyed a successful beta program with customers across industries in recent months.
A component of Information Builders’ powerful WebFOCUS BI platform, InfoDiscovery enables users to benefit from all of WebFOCUS’ key features – including visualisations, metadata, security, and more – without purchasing additional user seats, making it an economical addition to users’ BI portfolios. Throughout the beta period, Information Builders’ customers have benefited from InfoDiscovery’s flexibility and self-service visual analysis capabilities. The solution aggregates diverse data sets, from personal spreadsheets to big data sources, and visually depicts the information for exploration across different dimensions. This enables organisations to spot hidden patterns and relationships in the raw data that might go undetected in traditional BI reports or dashboards. In addition, InfoDiscovery is customisable by role and skillset, ensuring that business analysts, power users, and mainstream business users have the right tool or app for more insights and informed decision-making across the organisation.
Another InfoDiscovery key feature is the solution’s advanced geographical analysis, made possible by intuitive, compelling maps that blend spatially-related data with external demographic or market information to improve trend detection, locate inventory, and identify fraud, for example. InfoDiscovery includes access to cloud-based Esri Maps, the world’s most advanced mapping service.
InfoDiscovery comes bundled with a high-speed analytics Sandbox, a columnar data store that stores large amounts of data for fast retrieval, aggregation, and calculation – without the need for complex indexing or pre-aggregation of data. Its columnar technology uses memory efficiently, but is not limited to traditional in-memory limitations. As such, InfoDiscovery can deliver near-instant response times for very large data sets.
Numerous organisations that have gleaned value from InfoDiscovery during the early adopter program include American Express, Plex Systems, Food for the Poor, and RainTree Oncology Services.
“RainTree is working to incorporate InfoDiscovery into the RainTree Analytics suite of tools that power OncoExplorer, a cloud-based analytics portal that enables cancer researchers to trace a patient’s complete oncology history, from the time of initial diagnosis to the present day,” explained Scott Skellenger, vice president and chief information officer, RainTree Oncology Services. “RainTree collects patient data from electronic medical records, pharmacy dispense systems, and practice management systems and uses the data to improve identification of clinical patterns across systems and use those patterns to enhance cancer research. The incorporation of InfoDiscovery into RainTree’s BI platform enables the company to improve visual pattern identification across disparate sources and ultimately assist in the fight to improve cancer research efforts and save lives.”
“Since its launch earlier this year, InfoDiscovery has seen significant adoption across industries, a trend which speaks to both the demand for visual analysis in the market as well as the desire for self-service tools that bring the power of data and BI to a wider group of users,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform is designed to enable and empower every stakeholder, and as a key component of the platform, InfoDiscovery adopts the same approach. Analysts and less technical users can explore their data with ease, and make better decisions as a result. We will continue to invest in InfoDiscovery capabilities to help our customers take advantage of data discovery as part of their overall business intelligence strategy, without the added expense that other data discovery tools carry.”
