4th Annual IBI UserMeet
October 2018 is close to wraps but the excitement of #IBIusermeet is still fresh in our minds! The event was a success with overwhelming responses from the participants who had travelled almost from all over India. BI developers, managers and decision makers from some of the biggest names of the Indian industry landscape, participated in the event and shared their long-standing experience with WebFOCUS. While the participants belonged to multifarious industries ranging from Finance to Automobile, each one brought deep technical experience to the table.
While some of the participating companies already use WebFOCUS, we saw an emerging crowd of seasoned BI experts appraising the new features and considering a shift to WebFOCUS. This set of participants had come in search of a reliable and modern BI solution to steer their business decisions. Succinctly put, everyone was geared up for a deeper dive in WebFOCUS.
The user meet started off with Sayee Rajamany (VP, Amtex Systems) giving an overview of what participants could expect out of this user meet, the dynamics of the BI world and how WebFOCUS fits wonderfully in it. We also had Andy Kirby (Senior System Engineer – Information Builders), who travelled all the way from New York for the User Meet to introduce all the novel features packed in WebFOCUS.
Sessions Overview
Session: WebFOCUS Page Designer
Andy Kirby highlighted the features of the all-new WebFOCUS Designer and showcased how easy it is to use this tool to create interactive and responsive pages with NO CODING, thanks to a modern user interface with intuitive navigation. The new Page Designer allows for streamlined content creation, and the flexibility to build BI Portals that are instantly compatible with any browser or mobile device – making it the ultimate partner for Self-service BI initiatives. Demonstrating the user-friendly drag-n-drop functionality, Andy also highlighted the new user experience of BI portal and the WebFOCUS homepage. The entire presentation was based on the fact that self service BI is for everyone and anyone can create visually appealing charts and reports with no coding skills.
Session: WebFOCUS on Cloud
WebFOCUS is now available on AWS Cloud as a PaaS. Yep, that’s right! The session demonstrated how smooth it is to transition to the AWS cloud and getting started with the popular BI tool is now a matter of hours and not days (or weeks). This approach offers end users powerful, dynamic and interactive information, coupled with high availability and easy access. Companies can access WebFOCUS applications on AWS using either hybrid architecture or choose to go cloud full-fledged.
The excitement in the room was palpable when participants realized that the leading BI and analytics software is now available for immediate purchase and rapid deployment in the AWS marketplace! The bright side –
- Generate analytics without IT intervention
- Create new environments with a few clicks
- Create thousands of interactive visualizations that inform and improve decision making with “Anytime Anywhere Access”
- With Self-service BI, transform your business into an agile and responsive organization with business insight
Session: RedShift Powered IB App
Amazon Redshift is a fast, easy to use, highly scalable and cost-effective data warehouse. It performs ten times faster than other data warehouses by using machine learning, massively parallel query execution, and columnar storage on high-performance disk.Getting started with Redshift is pretty easy and it takes only minutes to run queries across big datain the Redshift data warehouse. It costs as low as $0.25 per hour and as high as $250 per terabyte per year, which is less than one-tenth the cost of other solutions.
Benefits
- Better and Faster Performance
- Easy Deployment and Management
- Cost Effective as compared to other Data Warehouse
- Scalable as per needs
- Secured
In this session AmtexBI presented a futuristic approach when it comes to migrating data to RedShift – using modern ETL techniques. Bid Adieu to the traditional extract, transform and load paradigm! We present to you extract and load, followed by transformation – which is blazing fast thanks to the Massively Parallel Processing Redshift! With 10x faster speeds, this is the future of Cloud Migration. This session was proof to the innovation that powers Infobuild India and Amtex BI.
Automation Testing
Amidst all the knowledge sharing on WebFOCUS and Cloud, it is pertinent to note that the User Meet showcased Amtex BI’s Testing Automation Tool for Reports. Most participants agreed unanimously that they relied on manual testing when it comes to BI Reports. A QA Automation tool to execute test cases on BI reports is significantly faster than the manual testing and is highly reliable. This nifty tool by Amtex BI was welcomed by the crowd since it best suits Regression Testing, Performance Testing, and Load Testing. This tool could prove immensely helpful for any highly repeatable functional test cases. Test results are available with live status and a descriptive log.
Networking and Contest
When we mix business with contests, the crowd gets creative and it holds true for IBI User Meet as well. The contests involved the Q&A session of the presented new technologies with the participants. We say not-all-business and we stick to it. To add an element of fun to the Meetup,we had a special giveaway for the person who had travelled the farthest!
Amtex BI announced a social media contest where top three social media entries with ‘hashtag’ IBIUserMeet and @AmtexBI mention could win exciting shopping vouchers. This encouraged people to come forward and interact with one another on a whole new different level – pictures were getting clicked at the photo booth and interviews were given with great fervor.
We look forward to the 5th Annual User Meet with hopes of hosting a bigger audience and presenting futuristic innovations in the analytics space.
