Business Intelligence Application Creation – Tom Cruise Style

Although I never imagined myself in this position, it’s happening just like the Precogs said it would:  I’m writing about BI and Tom Cruise in the same piece.  A strange combination, but the imagery from the movie Minority Report seems like a helpful metaphor in describing the experience of our customers as they develop BI apps in our product.  Even if you’ve never seen the movie, the picture below provides more than enough information to help me share this brief story.  Let’s dissect this picture John Madden style and see how this Hollywood scene applies to the development of BI Apps – software involving display of analytics, visual interaction, and transactional integration to carry out decisions and actions based on the analytics.

Because there is a visual assembly canvas and a wide variety of available BI building blocks inLogiXML’s product, our IT customers talk about a path of component assembly rather than coding from ground up. Developing real-time analytical apps is a visual process which begins with recognizable analytics and application features – think Lego pieces for BI and analytical apps.  From the tiniest little Lego bricks all the way up to those pre-built tire, wheel, axle assemblies that makes it faster to build a car or truck with big Lego kits, there are hundreds of visual, analytical, form, integration, mobile, and workflow process components to construct whatever production app business users need today.

He quickly added window and tire enhancements…back on the road in minutes.

LogiXML customers like how the assembly canvas is drag and drop and supports an immediate view of the outcome as it would appear live on the Web.  If they or their users don’t like something or want an additional piece of functionality, they quickly remove the component and pick another.  Each component has default settings, but since every application along with its integration ecosystem is unique, you can quickly tune the properties of each building block to rapidly achieve production readiness – something you can’t quite do with Lego’s. Not yet, anyway.

This is the description of the BI app assembly process described by our customers. But the game changer here from a business perspective comes when they sum up their feelings, and that’s when many of them say that LogiXML helps them to innovate at a rapid pace and competitive cost.  They describe how people who are not advanced Java or C# web developers can quickly compose and deploy beautiful, powerful apps with visual richness and interactive functionality that actually integrates with transactional systems; they love how their BI apps aren’t just static displays.  Some use the term “Live Reports” to describe apps that give users a place to view and understand information and simultaneously act and improve business outcomes.  To paraphrase one customer:  the product provides report writers, database developers, and analysts with a tool and a highly agile, imagination-realizing paradigm for analytics apps at a fraction of the time, skill, and cost demanded by other alternatives.

Thanks LogiXML customers!  I look forward to sharing more of your thoughts and stories about this “Tom Cruise” style of BI app creation.

Chor-Ching Fan is the sr. director of product management at LogiXML. Read other post by Chor-Ching here and here.