Real-Time Transformations

Data Where, When, and How You Need It

Data loses value quickly when it's not available to users where, when, and how they need it. Providing data in real time remains a key challenge for organizations that want to maximize the value of their application and business intelligence investments.

Real-time information requirements force administrators and architects to make serious engineering choices. Should data be transformed at the source, or manipulated after it moves to the target platform? Should it be handled through XML standards, SQL standards, or a combination? Are the larger file sizes of XML justified by the manipulation flexibility that they provide over SQL record sets? Should the data be put into a warehouse in near-real time, or should queries be distributed over multiple operational systems?

Fortunately, WebFOCUS lets administrators manipulate data in the way that makes the most sense for their environment. All the power of iWay Software, Information Builders' integration subsidiary, can be used by WebFOCUS for real-time data integration and transformation, including sophisticated manipulations such as:

• Aggregations, sorts, and joins on the source data before it leaves the source platform
• Data set-level transformations with multiple roll-up levels, summations, and more – on a single pass of the source data
• Field-level transformations that can later be selected as if they were standard database fields

In addition, real-time process flows can feed your business intelligence system with data from Web services, EDI documents, XML messages, flat files, and almost any other document format.

iWay Service Manager — iWay Software's unique and powerful enterprise service bus (ESB) — helps you rapidly absorb documents from business events and transform them into data that can be consumed by WebFOCUS. Developers can quickly tap into applications through their application programming interfaces (APIs), or even through automatically generated Web services, to reuse business logic and gain valuable insights into operational processes. When information is captured it can be enriched through queries and lookups against other systems, which ensures that it is always relevant when it reaches the user.

Finally, all of this can be done either with or without a data warehouse. Messages can be transformed on the fly and used to trickle-feed a data warehouse, inserted into a WebFOCUS ReportCaster scheduled report, or supplied to a user through e-mail.

No matter what your real-time requirements may be, Information Builders WebFOCUS can meet them.