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BI This Week
DataBeacon Embraces .NET in Query/Analysis Solution
Company announces Smart Client, an end-user ad hoc query and
analysis solution based on Microsoft’s .NET platform
10/20/2004
By Stephen Swoyer
To many BI professionals, DataBeacon Inc. is best known as the
company behind Actuate Corp.’s e.Analytics offering. The truth is
that DataBeacon is a full-fledged BI player in its own right. In
fact, the Ottawa-based company has a strong presence in the
mid-market, where its Java-based ad hoc query and reporting
solution, Open Client, is popular in organizations of between 100
and 1,000 customers.
Last week, DataBeacon announced the availability of a similar
technology, called Smart Client, that is based on Microsoft’s .NET
platform.
Like Open Client, Smart Client is available in three flavors,
each of which is designed for a particular user constituency. But
Smart Client also boasts a new feature—called DataBeacon Player—that
purports to graft a Windows Media Player-like interface on top of an
end-user reporting tool.
DataBeacon positions Smart Client as a “no-touch” reporting
solution. This gives users the option of either installing Smart
Client as a standard desktop application or opting for a no-touch
“Webtop” distribution scheme, says Andy Coutts, DataBeacon’s
president and CEO.
“One of the beautiful things about .NET is that you can actually
treat it as a desktop install product, or a no-touch product where a
person connecting over the Web has it actually delivered down to
their browser,” he says.
Smart Client is available in three different form factors:
Analyst, an entry-level offering, Smart Client Standard, and Smart
Client Professional.
Coutts says users can tap the Analyst offering to design and
navigate reports on their PCs from .txt or flat file data, as well
as share static versions of these reports via e-mail.
Smart Client Standard lets users expose Web reporting and data
analysis from Microsoft-, Linux-, or Unix-based Web servers to PCs
with the .NET framework installed. It includes three viewers: Web
Reporter (for casual-use information consumers); Player (for more
frequent data explorers); and DataBeacon Insight (Coutts says this
version is intended for analysts, report designers, and power
users).
The final deliverable, Smart Client Professional, includes all of
these features, and introduces an API that gives users a scripting
language for creating custom data profiles. This can help with
portal development efforts and enhance integration with existing
systems, according to Coutts.
Coutts says that DataBeacon Player puts a new spin on the way all
kinds of users can interact with reports. “Much the same way people
are used to Windows Media Player and those types of technologies, we
actually have a player that allows people to expand [report] data
and easily customize the view that they’re seeing,” he says.
DataBeacon Player is similar to Windows Media Player in appearance,
provides a toolbar view that lets users launch reports or perform
common functions—such as copying, pasting, exporting to Excel—and
also facilitates point-and-click customization of report data.
Just as important, Coutts notes: it’s tightly integrated with
Microsoft’s Office application stack and can easily be embedded in a
portal view. “By integrating with the .NET framework on the client,
you get great desktop integration. That’s another thing we
discovered in the mid-market—users actually spend most of their day
in Microsoft Office. With the player, out of the box you have a much
richer experience, where I could simply have report viewing in my
portal.”
DataBeacon has a somewhat unusual topology in that it does not do
OLAP processing on the server side. Instead, it feeds data from
relational repositories—via ODBC, JDBC, or other connectivity
standards—to an OLAP engine, dubbed the Client OLAP Reporting
Environment (CORE), running on the client side. “We publish
information with a cube design plus a query to the data source out
to a Web server, and from there it gets picked up and delivered to
the client,” Coutts explains. “Once we have that data source, we can
actually build cube designs in real time, and this gives our
cube-building technology a very high rate of compression, as well as
very high speed.”
Client-side OLAP may be DataBeacon’s bread-and-butter, but the
company has also introduced support for Microsoft’s OLAP Analysis
Services—which runs on top of SQL Server 2000—for its Open Client
product. Coutts says a similar offering is on the way for the Smart
Client tools, although he declines to promise a specific delivery
date.
“Right now, this is working on top of the client OLAP reporting
environment. We are in development on hooking this to Analysis
Services as well,” he says.
Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in
Athens, Ga. You can contact Stephen via E-mail at swoyerse@percipient-analytics.com.
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