ibi WebFOCUS 9.2 continues to unify BI operations while innovating UI, reporting, and containerization

ibi, a scalable data and analytics software platform that makes data easy to access and analytics easy to consume, is announcing the general availability of ibi WebFOCUS 9.2—an enterprise business intelligence and analytics solution equipped with data management, visual discovery, predictive analytics, and powerful visualizations. The recent release offers updates to ibi WebFOCUS Designer and WebFOCUS Container Edition, as well as introduces new features, including exposed analytics with white-labeling.

ibi WebFOCUS combines the aforementioned capabilities within a unified platform, offering a one-stop-shop for enterprise users attempting to optimize their data management and analytics operations, according to the company.

“Each release is always a balance of satisfying top customer requests and innovating to introduce new capabilities driven by both market research and our vision for the future of the analytics and business intelligence market,” said Vijay Raman, head of product and technology at Cloud Software Group, ibi’s parent company.

The 9.2 release of WebFOCUS introduces new capabilities that allow embedded BI, OEM, and resellers to rebrand WebFOCUS interfaces to reflect the look and feel of its hosting solution, according to the vendor.

To illustrate white-labeling’s effectiveness, Raman offered an example of a WebFOCUS customer seeking to give users the ability to write their own reports and dashboards from within the application. Originally, the users downloaded a spreadsheet of their investment information and then used their tool of choice to do further analysis, but, as Raman pointed out, this would've made for a poor user experience, compounded with the security risk that would have exposed the customer to threats.

“By white-labeling the WebFOCUS Hub and WebFOCUS Designer, users can now offer this capability all within the workflow of the application, with a look and experience that perfectly matches that of the hosting application,” explained Raman. “In this case, a user wouldn’t even realize they are using WebFOCUS, but would know that they can now create reports and dashboards right from within the workflow of the hosting application.”

WebFOCUS 9.2 additionally innovates on its WebFOCUS Designer and Container Edition offerings, which streamline numerous processes to ease user experience.

WebFOCUS Designer now supports a new canvas within the service—document mode—as well as offers interactions and filter expressions. Document mode enables users to easily generate customized layouts and distribute them in varying formats, including PDF or HTML.

“Enterprise reporting is at the heart of the WebFOCUS solution,” said Raman. “With document mode, interactions, and filter expressions that are introduced to Designer, report and application developers get to take advantage of a quantum leap in usability, experience, and functional completeness, while also being able to take advantage of new capabilities. The outcome is that reports and applications are created faster and as more desirable for the end user, who receives modern looking reports and applications that are more interactive and optimized for use on mobile devices.”

In the 9.2 release, WebFOCUS Container Edition streamlines auto-scaling while remaining cloud-agnostic, additionally driving speed and ease-of-use of Kubernetes to support hybrid clouds, according to the vendor. The flexibility of containerization, as well as seamless auto-scaling, presents a wealth of opportunities for enterprises to increase efficiency across its operations.

“With containerization, organizations can deploy environments faster, either in a private cloud or by leveraging existing services offered by cloud providers. Auto-scaling capabilities will react to real-time changes in demand, ensuring customer success in all scenarios by appropriately increasing the number of components when demand is high, or similarly reducing the components, and their hardware footprint, when demand is low,” said Raman.

The latest iteration of WebFOCUS adheres to ibi’s driving themes, which empower intuitive, robust, and functionally-complete BI and analytics available on-prem, in the cloud, or a hybrid mix. As the year progresses, ibi will continue to maintain these tenets while innovating on user productivity, experience, and BI.

“We have spent the last five years making WebFOCUS Designer the most functionally complete, modern content creation tool on the market,” concluded Raman. “We like to say that the WebFOCUS Designer represents the collision of modern BI with traditional BI; it supports the usability demanded by business users that do self-service data preparation, visual analytics, and augmented analytics, yet it also remains true to its core with the deep functional capabilities demanded by report and application developers.”

To learn more about ibi WebFOCUS 9.2, please visit https://www.ibi.com/.