The drive to generate better business results by collaboration is spreading to business intelligence developers with two new releases announced Monday by ProClarity Corp. and MicroStrategy Inc.
ProClarity announced Release 5 of its namesake Analytics Platform, which allows decision-makers to pool data they collect and share previously-defined best analytic practices and business processes.
Separately, MicroStrategys namesake 7i platform also supports collaboration, allowing users to send reports to other users at the click of a mouse as well as allowing them to schedule reports for regular delivery, publish reports to their workgroups, and export reports in Excel, PDF or HTML formats, company officials said.
In this release, MicroStrategy is also introducing its IntelligentCubes technology, which combines multi-dimensional and relational OLAP analysis through a Web interface. MicroStrategy 7i also features a new, more Windows-like interface with drag-and-drop report formatting, drop-down menu bars, and right-mouse click drill-down, without requiring ActiveX or Java applet downloads.
Other new features in MicroStrategy 7i include support for portable analytics modules—predefined reports and workflows that could be configured to existing databases and data warehouses—and pre-packaged connectors into portal software from Epicentric Inc., Plumtree Software Inc. and Hummingbird Ltd.
Similarly there is a Web Services Development Kit in this release that allows users to build their own connectors from MicroStrategy 7i into other applications via Web Services protocols like SOAP and UDDI.
ProClarity 5 includes two new products, Selector and Business Reporter for Excel. Selector, the collaborative piece of the new suite, adds comparison, filtering and selection capabilities to help users find the information theyre looking for out of their massive amounts of data. It builds step-by-step scripts to capture the analysis process so that it can be re-used for future analyses, officials said.
Business Reporter for Excel meanwhile links the Microsoft desktop spreadsheet application with ProClarity applications. Data can be brought into Excel from ProClarity, then published to the ProClarity Analytics Server as an Excel workbook.
MicroStrategy 7i is available Friday. Per-user pricing ranges from $700 to $1,000, while per-server pricing is $60,000 to $70,000 per CPU. ProClarity 5 ships May 13 and is priced at $675 per user.
