Business intelligence (BI) tool vendors have made giant strides over the past decade. But user consumption of BI tools hasn't kept pace with sales, primarily because the products tend to be hard to deploy and difficult to use. (For a closer look at the BI marketplace, read "What's Next for Business Intelligence?").

Several vendors have focused on providing new features that support the latest IT buzzwords at the expense of strengthening their basic reporting and analysis architecture. WebFocus 5 from Information Builders — one of the oldest companies in the BI industry — concentrates on getting the basics right. Released earlier this year, the latest incarnation of the 25-year-old Focus product combines its traditional strength in query and analysis with higher-end features such as financial reporting, Web-services support, closed-loop BI, customized dashboards, and report bursting. WebFocus 5 also capably addresses enterprise-level challenges such as security, scalability, administration, customized application development, and timely data delivery.

Reporting and Analysis

Because the WebFocus installation involves configuring several components, doing it yourself isn't recommended. But it's also not necessary: Information Builders provides free installation services when you buy the product. I found the GUI friendly and intuitive; users with little or no SQL knowledge should be able to navigate it and create reports fairly easily. True to its name, WebFocus is a completely Web-based solution. Users can access all reporting and analysis functions directly through a Web browser.

WebFocus supports multiple report formats (including HTML, PDF, and Excel) and offers a compound report feature that lets users combine several reports (with the same or varied layouts and formats) into a single one. Complex drill-downs are possible in all supported output formats. It's also possible to set up reports that let users drill across other data sources. For example, from an internally generated sales report, a user could potentially click on a link next to a customer name and drill across to a Web site that displays the current value of that customer's stocks. WebFocus supports on-demand paging and generates a table of contents to ease navigation of large reports.

It can natively access more than 85 data sources ranging from legacy systems to proprietary cubes, and it supports canned, ad hoc, and online analytic processing (OLAP) reporting. The Dimension Builder incorporates OLAP functionality into any report without having to build a cube.

The financial reporting and analysis module that ships with WebFocus 5 includes a modeling tool for generating balance sheets, profit and loss analysis, income statements, and other financial reports. The module also includes several forecasting features and statistical functions. A set of analytic templates tailored for specific vertical industry segments (such as insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, and higher education) were created for standard business functions such as metrics deviations, trending, ranking, variance, dependency analysis, and business segmentation. WebFocus i-vision, an optional component in the WebFocus family of products, provides an interface to SAP data.