There's a new player in business intelligence (BI), as Altair recently announced the general release of Envision, a cloud-based BI platform to be sold under Altair's subsidiary solidThinking. Envision aims to differentiate itself from other BI platforms by offering “an optimized self-service user experience.”
BI tools like Envision will become ever more important in the Internet of Things (IoT) age as technical businesses strive to find engineering meaning and insight in their big data.
Let's take a look at some of Envision's features:
- Accessible as both a subscription-based public cloud platform and as a private cloud BI solution. For both options, Envision does not offer price tiers between viewers and authors. Rather, all users are treated as authors and given full administrative privileges for specific user permissions and access. Furthermore, Envision does not catch users with add-on fees and allows unlimited dashboards and reports.
- Included analytical data engine. Envision comes with an in-memory column-based data engine, but gives users the option to employ their own preexisting data sources and engines (including CSV, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, MySQL and more) for a fully customizable experience.
- Embeddable Analytics. Envision offers automated embed link generation for a wide variety of applications, and it works in conjunction with developer application program interfaces (APIs) to simplify integration with web apps and third-party solutions.
“Altair continues to invest significantly in technologies to enable and leverage exascale computing, cloud appliances and IoT,” said Altair Founder and CEO James R. Scapa. “All of which are driving big data and the need to rapidly access, visualize, analyze and share information at all levels in the enterprise.”
Big data presents both a problem as well as a solution to IoT engineers and BI analysts alike. The bad news is that you have a lot of data to handle. The silver lining is the confidence that beneath the murky waters of that data lie insights and answers. And while Altair isn’t the first to try and tame big data, Envision will hopefully offer engineers an improvement over existing BI platforms. Even a slight competitive edge could be highly valuable in wielding new analytical insights.
“Flexibility and ease of use are a big part of what defines Envision,” explained Yeshwant Mummaneni, Altair’s senior VP of Analytics. “These attributes transpire not only in its user interface, with the ability to build dashboards in minutes and modify layout with a few clicks, but also in Envision’s ability to integrate with other applications in a very seamless and easy fashion.”
So is Envision really the future of analytics? Comment below.