The Original “Business Intelligence Extranet” Post

So I did a post about a year ago when I was starting to form the ideas for our product. It’s cool looking back at it to see where we’ve come. We’ve got something working that does what I wrote, and that’s very cool.

During a recent client engagement it became apparent that there is a need in the market for a Business Intelligence Extranet.What do I mean by a Business Intelligence (BI) Extranet? It’s a good place to start–the definition. For the purposes of this posting, a BI Extranet is defined as:

A secure web portal made available to an organization’s clients, partners, or other external groups for the purpose of presenting structured, relevant information through reports, ad hoc analyses, dashboards, and other visual elements.

Ok so let’s break that down:

1. Secure Web Portal–Essentially you need a web application that is able to authenticate users across different organizations, provide a framework for authorizations down to the report component or web page layer, and keep track of a user’s identity and group membership across page views.
2. Clients, Partners, External Groups–The users in an Extranet in general are those outside to the organization developing the application. For example, a software company might create an extranet to demonstrate to its consulting partners their YTD performance on several metrics (sales revenue, client satisfaction, etc.).
3. Sharing Structured, Relevant Information–This seems obvious I guess, but the whole point is to present information that has been structured into something interesting to the user. You can’t just have a standard portal page with a few documents to search through. You need to spend the time in the normal functions of analysis & design on the underlying data. That data needs to be structured in such a way as to allow relevant and valuable reports to be created against it.
4. Reports, Ad Hoc Analysis, Dashboards–This is the meat. Create a dashboard of the high level metrics, present a guided path from there to some static and parameter-driven reports, and then allow ad hoc analysis when the information calls for it.

Now that we have a good working definition, let’s talk about the market. Many times when I’m speaking to a client about a possible BI project the first thing they’ll ask for is a rating of the different products on the market. I’ll hear questions about Business Objects, Hyperion, Microsoft, Targit, ProClarity (now Microsoft), Cognos, and other vendors. My standard (and correct I feel) answer is to say something like, “Each of these are excellent tools and they may work for you. Let’s explore this a bit more in the first phase of a project and we’ll see where we end up. It looks like at this point that is looking like a good choice, but that could change as we find out more information.”

The issue comes in when you start to consider the mix and depth of requirements that tend to come up and compare those requirements to the base features of any BI product suite. Very few of the product suites support an extranet. They are much more focused on features for corporate intranets, small groups of power users, etc. They are also now more inclined to target an entire BI environment with their product mix–data quality, ETL, reporting, analysis, dashboards, etc.

What the market seems to be missing (or perhaps what I’ve missed in the market) is a product made specifically for the BI extranet.