Business Intelligence
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
By Stephen Swoyer
10/20/2004
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.
