In-Depth

Briefs: Business Objects, SAS, Pervasive

BusinessObjects delivers on enterprise performance management; SAS joins Liberty Alliance Project; full-text sub-second searches of Pervasive.SQL databases

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 07/09/2003

Business Objects SA announced BusinessObjects Performance Manager, a new tool that provides advanced goal management and scorecarding capabilities, along with guided analysis of business metrics.

Performance Manager marks the second phase of Business Objects' enterprise performance management (EPM) initiative. Business Objects unveiled the first phase of its EPM strategy this January, when it launched BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, the Business Objects Open Financial Applications Initiative, and a new relationship with global management consultancy A.T. Kearney.

Business Objects positions Performance Manager as an integral part of its just-released Enterprise 6 end-to-end BI suite (see http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=1272). The company says its new EPM entry allows organizations to connect goals, metrics, and people to facilitate greater business insight, alignment, and fast action.

Business Objects Performance Manager features a self-described easy-to-use goal management interface, along with a wizard-driven workflow environment that lets organizations define, modify, and distribute goals based on employee roles. Companies can assign ownership to individuals or groups, for example, to assign responsibility for particular goals. The product provides out-of-the-box, role-based scorecarding functionality. Its scorecard interface lets users sort goals by their most-relevant categories. This allows organizations to push goals to individuals in a more focused way. The product’s support for trend and stoplight indicators lets users receive at-a-glance updates on the status of metrics, understand their daily performance relative to their operational goals, and monitor how their performance affects an organization’s overall strategy. Performance Manager exploits Business Objects’ Application Foundation, which enables users to access the capabilities of BusinessObjects Analytics, a suite of analytic applications.

SAS Joins Liberty Alliance

SAS Institute Inc. last week announced that it had joined the Liberty Alliance Project as an associate member.

The Liberty Alliance was formed in late 2001 by Sun Microsystems Inc. and other vendors to develop standards for federated network identity management and identity-based services. Today the alliance has 160 members.

Organizations implementing Liberty Alliance's federated network identity specifications can offer customers, business partners, or employees new levels of personalization, security, and control over information.

ISV partners typically support Liberty Alliance standards in their own products. SAS says that it joined the Alliance to help ensure that its products use Liberty technology to aid customers and partners.

Pervasive Strikes Deal for Full-Text Search

Pervasive Software Inc. has licensed a full-text search software to complement its Pervasive.SQL database.

The search technology, designed by Abacus Research A.G., lets users search for information even if they do not know the exact search item or where it’s located. Abacus’ technology allows partial match, wild card, and fuzzy logic searches of application and Web portal data. Pervasive says it also facilitates sub-second response times across large databases.

Although a component of the Abacus technology will be incorporated into Pervasive.SQL as a standard feature, Pervasive says that it will probably release the technology as a separate, branded Pervasive product later this year.

The company says it is currently collaborating with several customers to help them integrate the new search technology into their applications. Pervasive plans to make the new search capability available to ISVs so they can integrate it into their applications or Web portals to enable searching across application data stored in the embedded Pervasive.SQL database.

Eventually, Pervasive will offer a heterogeneous search capability that can search across multiple databases and applications through a single interface.