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AIA

ProClarity BI roadshow comes to London

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10th Jun 2006
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ProClarity, one of the new breed of business intelligence (BI) developers exploiting Microsoft SQL Server's Analysis Services and Reporting Services modules, staged a three day conference in London's Langham Hotel this week.

Now in its 10th year, ProClarity is taking on BI giants such as Hyperion, Cognos and Geac, but has a strong ally in Microsoft. Bill Gates's software developers are well known for coming up with new technologies such as SQL Server's reporting and analysis tools, but needs specialists such as ProClarity and OutlookSoft to fit these generic tools to the day-to-day needs of financial managers and analysts.

The ProClarity product family includes components to construct business logic models and performance analysis measures using SQL Server's online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities. These models can be rolled out to users over the web via role-based dashboards. As you might expect from a Microsoft-endorsed BI system, Excel plays a prominent part as an interface to the underlying data.

One of the end-user tools available is the ProClarity Business Reporter for Excel, which can import multidimensional data from SQL Server's Analysis Services module into Excel. While the user can play with the data and apply new formulae and formats, the Excel tool retains a connection to the underlying data cube. The ProClarity Analytics Server module acts as a central store for these spreadsheets to ensure users are work with common data sets.

Now with a UK office near Heathrow, the Idaho-based software house chose London as the venue for its annual "Understanding" conference, which this year focused on the new BI tools coming out in Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 release later this year.

"The release of SQL Server 2005 will have a significant impact on the BI industry, and we are excited to offer this opportunity for ProClarity users to learn how to utilise this break-through technology," said Johan Pellicaan, managing director for ProClarity International.

Sessions included a presentation from BI consultant Mark Whitehorn on the Unified Dimensional Model that makes the same data tables in SQL Server available for OLAP-based BI. Companies including Aon, the London Development Agency and Audi described their experiences with ProClarity products.

During the event, ProClarity announced that its Analytics Platform had received a .NET Connected designation from Microsoft and that the company would be developing new visualisation features in the product range to accompany next year's launch of Windows Vista. The animation and static drawing abilities in Windows Presentation Foundation within Vista would enhance ProClarity's analytical abilities and allow users to get a better understanding of complex business data and make more informed business decisions, explained Russ Whitney, vice president of product development for ProClarity.

John Stokdyk

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