Business Intelligence(BI) has been a growth segment in the Enterprise software space during last decade. The recent acquisitions of Hyperion (by Oracle) and Business Objects (by SAP) show their importance also. BI has been the front-end to the Data Warehousing efforts at large enterprises. Most of the BI vendors provide query and reporting to enterprise databases (inside the firewall) on pre-formatted screens on a desktop. They are deployed on a client-server architecture with very little flexibility for the user to change the look and feel or the contents visualization aspects.
Now comes two challenges. The first area is the use of "search" as a new metaphor, where context-specific search to the Internet cloud can be made to complement the current BI scope. For example, a customer might want to see latest price changes made to a competitive product while looking at their own product movement in the market to explain a dip in sales.
The second area is this notion of "Interactive Visualization". Kurt Schlegel of Gartner Group has described this phenomenon in a research report (dated 7/6/2007) as follows:
"Interactive visualization is a business intelligence (BI) platform capability that enables the display and understanding of multidimensional data, provides a wide array of visualization chart types, and enables users to accomplish traditional data exploration tasks by making charts interactive. Interactive visualization, which has been used primarily in the scientific and engineering communities, will be widely adopted to explore traditional business data during the next few years."
Curl platform is used by many traditional business customers to do precisely this form of interactive visualization. The basic architecture of compiling code on the client hardware makes it very efficient and capable of handling large volumes of data. Also the vast number of built-in functions enables rapid development. Many customers are using this Interactive Visualization as a key competitive differentiation for market success.
Now comes two challenges. The first area is the use of "search" as a new metaphor, where context-specific search to the Internet cloud can be made to complement the current BI scope. For example, a customer might want to see latest price changes made to a competitive product while looking at their own product movement in the market to explain a dip in sales.
The second area is this notion of "Interactive Visualization". Kurt Schlegel of Gartner Group has described this phenomenon in a research report (dated 7/6/2007) as follows:
"Interactive visualization is a business intelligence (BI) platform capability that enables the display and understanding of multidimensional data, provides a wide array of visualization chart types, and enables users to accomplish traditional data exploration tasks by making charts interactive. Interactive visualization, which has been used primarily in the scientific and engineering communities, will be widely adopted to explore traditional business data during the next few years."
Curl platform is used by many traditional business customers to do precisely this form of interactive visualization. The basic architecture of compiling code on the client hardware makes it very efficient and capable of handling large volumes of data. Also the vast number of built-in functions enables rapid development. Many customers are using this Interactive Visualization as a key competitive differentiation for market success.