SPImpact MAP™
Millennium Applications Platform
Companies who seek competitive advantage in today's marketplace are finding it critical to put timely information in front of senior executives. Creating useful knowledge from disparate data and information is difficult given the global scope of a company's operations. Successful companies apply technology to address such global operating issues. But these companies will only achieve strategic goals by providing the right information, at the right time, to business managers who can then make informed, timely decisions.

What is the appropriate technology? More companies are investing in IT by building and deploying data warehouses and data marts and installing ERP systems. This investment in capturing corporate data is a fundamental cornerstone for providing the right information, but without adequate end user access or the correct business context, companies are unable to leverage this investment to obtain competitive advantage.

Current Business Intelligence (BI) tools used to provide end user access lack business expertise in their development. In addition, tying these tools into current business systems, legacy data and data warehouses requires complex component integration and long implementation cycles.

Open Ratings delivers an application development platform that allows companies to leverage existing corporate information. End users are then able to measure and track operations, comprehensively analyse potential challenges and emerging opportunities and adjust operational plans to optimise business performance. Companies need intelligent applications to leverage corporate data and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Open Ratings Intelligent Applications
Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions help drive business performance at strategic, management and operational levels by measuring, analysing, and communicating information that promotes corporate objectives and strategy.

The SPImpact Millennium Applications Platform (MAP) for analytical applications offers an approach and framework to build intelligent applications for EPM. Designed as a complete analytical application environment, SPImpact MAP delivers an unparalleled opportunity to leverage corporate data and link strategy, performance measurement and operational analysis within a single cohesive solution for enterprise-wide deployment.

Comprehensive Analysis
SPImpact MAP provides a highly scalable, open, three-tier architecture that includes the applications framework, a visual applications development environment, an OLAP database engine, Excel Add-in, web, client/server and thin client deployment options with advanced analytic capability. All of these components are contained within one integrated solution that can be deployed across heterogeneous networks, pagers and cellular devices to thousands of end users.

SPImpact MAPTM is based on an open architecture that includes the OLE DB for OLAP application programming interface, ODBC drivers, native SQL drivers from Merant (formerly Intersolv) as well as a thin client interface from Citrix.

SPImpact MAPTM provides end users with various deployment and display options. There are a wide variety of chart formats, including support for 3-D graphs and hot spots. Options include:

Slice and dice
User defined filtering
Formatting and calculations
Hierarchical drill down, up and anywhere
Charts
Value filtering
Color coding
Exception flagging
Variance reporting

The main components of SPImpact MAP are the application framework, the visual development environment, the OLAP engine, Websuite, Java and WAP clients and the Excel Add-in.

SPImpact MAPTM For Intelligent Applications
The MAP Application Framework has been carefully designed to provide much of the commonly-used core application functionality. By providing this functionality as a series of high-level application components, the Application Framework enables faster delivery of applications to users giving high return on investment. Additional benefits accrue through lower cost of application ownership, and consistency of user interface, which enables a faster learning curve for end users and easier acceptance of new applications. .

With continuing use of the MAP Application Framework, the benefits become considerable. Application upgrades are executed centrally, reducing what are typically huge maintenance costs.

The process of deploying a new application becomes one in which much of the activity consists of assembling and defining the application. While there will be some new functionality to be developed and/or data models to be defined, the development of menus, user administration and look-and-feel are largely predefined and automated.

The principal method for building applications in SPImpact MAP is via the Visual Development Environment. This applies a book-chapter-page metaphor to system objects such as tables and charts together with application objects, menus and page templates that come as part of the Application Framework.

Pages are built using the Builder Palette. Objects are dragged and dropped onto the application page and can then be resized and have attributes set.

A default set of attributes is inherited from a base builder object, or they may be modified through the Object Inspector. Objects are linked to data using the Connections Mapper, which defines the locations of data sources and associates the object with a business model in the database.

In most cases, the base level and Application Framework objects provided by SPImpact are enough to provide all the facilities required. Where additional application functionality is required, SPImpact MAP provides the MAP Development Language (GDL). GDL supports features such as event handling, dynamic SQL and an interface to the MAP Object Store.

The MAP OLAP engine, supports an unlimited number of relationships and dimensions of corporate data. The database is a scalable, robust data storage mechanism that is supplied with MAP.

The architecture of this database ensures fast, efficient manipulation of complex analysis requests, while full roll back and recovery ensures the security of your information. The MAP database is one of the options available for building the data warehouse or data mart upon which your applications feed.

Data can be (fast) loaded and consolidated from a variety of sources, while a drag-and-drop data flow diagram can be created to describe how and where to read, transform, clean and load that data. Another useful facility is database restructuring without unloading.

Database recovery is accomplished through the use of "units of work" that can be rolled back in the event of a failure.

WebSuite enables applications to be accessed seamlessly via Java- and ActiveX-enabled Web browsers. This allows SPImpact MAP customers to utilise the power of web technology to ensure lowest possible cost of application deployment. Unlike some web based deployment options, WebSuite allows full interaction with the application functionality. Additionally, Java applets, automatically attached to application pages, provide extra functionality through the HTML interface for certain operations, such as the creation of charts. MAP's web capabilities have achieved 100% Pure Java certification from Sun Microsystems, and provides support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for secure (encrypted and authenticated) e-commerce.

The Excel Add-in allows users to access the data stored in the MAP database, the MAP multidimensional database (MDDB) using this familiar format. Full OLAP capability, drill down, "slice and dice," pivot, charting, report creation and support for Excel calculations provide exceptional functionality coupled with ease of use for spreadsheet users. In addition, users can enter data for budgeting and forecasting and load this data into the OLAP engine, and can format reports through the Excel Add-in.

With over 200 clients worldwide, SPImpact MAP is proven technology with the power to deliver competitive advantage by leveraging corporate data and deploying information and comprehensive analytics with the appropriate business context to thousands of end users.

About GENTIA do Brasil

For more information:
faleconosco@gentia.com.br or call (+55) 11 5594-3321

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