Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) is quickly gaining ground as an ever-more-viable options to deliver solutions as it provides greater flexibility and a financially-appealing operating expense as opposed to capital expense model compared with premise-licensed products. There is as a result a growing array of SaaS providers.

 

InetSoft Technology has a timely new release of its business intelligence software featuring many improvements aimed at SaaS providers who embed dashboards and reports into their applications. Application providers will enjoy it says greater customization options while streamlining administration tasks associated with supporting large customer bases.

 

InetSoft’s core product, Style Intelligence, is a full-featured business intelligence solution that is 100 percent Java at the server level and HTML, JavaScript, and Flash at the client level, which combined with its SOA architecture and open standards-based technology. This makes it an ideal embedding and integration-ready application for dashboards and reporting. End-users get visually compelling, highly interactive access to data, and solution providers get a highly customizable, quick to learn and quick to deploy business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform.

 

This release from InetSoft addresses the fact that many SaaS products provide extensibility beyond their base data model. InetSoft’s application now makes it easy to strike a balance between manageability and flexibility by allowing base physical views and logical models to be extended. Changes can be made to the extended models that are specific to a certain user population, and updates to the standard model will only have to be made once. Users will see their custom objects as part of the base model, based on their group or role.

 

Other feature enhancements included in this product release are of interest to enterprises as well as technology providers. Chief among them is deepened support for OLAP cubes, such as those from Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL Server Analysis Services, Hyperion Essbase, and SAP NetWeaver, to be used as data sources.

 

While a multi-dimensional database yields high performance, the strict hierarchy of an OLAP Cube can be more of a limitation than a help when it comes to frequent ad hoc analysis needs. This restriction has been removed, so that now individual dimension attributes can be bound to aspects of a chart and areas of a crosstab or pivot table. For example, one can see the sales for every city, regardless of state or country, and color the bars by product, regardless of category. Selection elements can also be used to filter multi-dimensional data. This flexibility is provided at the user interface layer, while still taking advantage of the high performance backend that an OLAP server provides.

 

“Technology providers favor our lightweight but powerful business intelligence software over the cumbersome, integration-unfriendly solutions from BI vendors who focus primarily on pre-packaged enterprise deployments,” says Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft. “While we offer an out-of-the-box, ready-to-use business intelligence solution, we have years of experience listening to software OEMs to make our application as embeddable as possible and have also created a range of licensing options that match almost any business model.”

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