Why you should care about analytics
Billions of dollars are spent annually on software, databases and storage systems to help companies remain competitive. The typical enterprise owns hundreds of applications containing business-critical data about their customers, suppliers, inventory and employees. Few of those applications are designed to share data assets with one another, ensuring that much of that data will be left to waste or, at best, be underutilized. Companies today accumulate data at a remarkable rate.

A recent article in Forbes titled "Analyze This" estimated that the volume of corporate data doubles every nine months.IBM has found that companies use less than 1% of their corporate data for analysis. These trends make analytics more important than ever. The business problem is that as companies create data at an accelerated pace, organizations need to make decisions and act on that data faster than ever before. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) approaches designed to address this problem have failed to deliver the tangible 'day to day' value to business users and technology administrators alike. This has seen many BI solutions become exspensive pieces of ‘shelfware.’

The pace at which enterprises conduct business today means decision making and action-taking must be executed in line with such demands. This means speedy access to accurate and insightful data and analysis. Similarly, decision-making responsibilities are spread through-out the many layers of an enterprise, no longer are important decisions made soley at the executive or business analyst level. Many day-to-day decisions are made at the departmental and individual contributor level. As a result there are varying degrees of analytic skill to support decision making.

For an enterprise analytic solution to be truly successful, it must promote the ability to act on data at business speed, provide the ability to share company-wide 'best analytic practices', provide high user and IT productivity gains and be a solution that users broadly embrace because it makes them more insightful and effiencient at their jobs.

Architected to Deliver Value
The ProClarity approach focuses on three critical success factors: high user adoption, high user productivity and high IT productivity. At ProClarity believe any successful implementation of enterprise-scale analytic solutions must succeed in each of these three aspects. Based on this philosophy, the ProClarity Analytics Platform is built on a customizable platform designed to evolve with ever-changing business and technology requirements.

The advantage of the ProClarity Analytics Platform is its ability to deliver value to both business and technology users alike. ProClarity offers organizations the freedom to decide how they wish to deploy analytics within their organization.

With ProClarity you have the ability to fully customize the analytic platform based on the unique requirements of specific members in your organization; you can tailor the platform to fine tune the existing capabilities of ProClarity to meet your exact requirements or choose an install-and-go approach; which leverages existing features from the ProClarity Analytics Platform reducing time to delivery and increasing return on investment.

Either way, the open and component-based architecture of ProClarity 'future proofs' your investment in analytics by evolving with your organization over time.

ProClarity Analytics Platform

The ProClarity Analytics Platform is comprised of a middle tier server, the ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS). Depending on analytic ability or level of decision making responsilibity, a business user will interact with PAS using the either the ProClarity Web Professional or ProClarity Standard edition. ProClarity Web Professional is a powerful, feature rich desktop tool designed for business analysts or power users with a high level of analytic acumen. ProClarity Web Professional allows such experts to publish the results of their analysis (in the form of briefing books) out to PAS for company-wide consumption.

ProClarity Standard is a zero-footprint browser based user interface designed for typical business users within an organization. ProClarity Standard users consume the advanced analytics of power users which have been published to the server. ProClarity Standard users leverage the analysis of power users to support their day-to-day decision making. A typical deployment of ProClarity would see a select number of Professional users coupled with a larger number of Standard analytic consumers.

ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS) Architecture
The ProClarity® Analytics Server Release 5 sits at the heart of an organization’s decision-making process and significantly enhances its ability to efficiently respond to business change. Hassle-free access to data, comprehensive functionality for conducting analyses and the ability to easily share results with colleagues are core elements of its features.

Centralized distribution of software promotes productivity in deployment while collaborative features help propagate best practices across the enterprise. Uniform definitions of performance measures promote ‘one version of the truth’ within an organization. The ability to customize ProClarity means your analytic application can evolve with your organization and be tailored to match your unique business processes. A flexible and robust security model permits information sharing and ensures data is accessible only on a need-to-know basis.

ProClarity Analytics Server Release 5

ProClarity Business Reporter for Excel
A new tool just added to Release 5.2 of ProClarity Analytics Server is the Business Reporter for Excel. Designed to work in conjunction with ProClarity Standard, users gain the ability to receive standard or multi-dimensional views in the familiar Microsoft Excel format. Furthermore, the Business Reporter for Excel maintains a live connection to corporate data, meaning no more static reports. Importantly, ProClarity promotes ‘one version of the truth’ within your organization. Multiple queries can be accommodated within a single worksheet, then saved anywhere on the system with a number of refresh options.

ProClarity Selector ProClarity Selector provides analysts with the capability to do sophisticated analysis. Selector is an optional add-in for ProClarity Professional users. It provides an easy-to-use, menu driven interface that helps a user build complex queries without any knowledge of the underlying programming language. Results of the analyses can be saved on the ProClarity Analytics Server for sharing with other users. The sharing is enabled as a specific dataset or as a series of reusable busines logic. In this manner, an enterprise is able to easily propagate the expertise of a few individuals and develop company-wide best practices that contribute significantly towards improved decision-making.

Delivering analytics anywhere, over any Net
Regardless of your approach to the ProClarity Analytics Platform, our servers can interact with any information consumer across any kind of network: Intranet, Extranet or Internet. The real value of this is that you can reach your most valued users, employees, customers or partners faster than before and with zero footprint on the desktop.

Software Development Kit (SDK)
The component-based architecture of the ProClarity Analytics Platform release 5 makes our SDK all the more powerful a tool for customization. On the server side the SDK will allow administrators to fine-tune a number of elements to meet an organization’s specific needs. A few examples include the ability to replace the standard ProClarity security system with your own custom security model using the PSsecurityToken. Custom plug-ins can be developed with PPlugin.dll to deliver custom data visualizations, and Web publishing rights and click settings can be defined as default user setting across the system. The SDK will also allow you to customize almost any aspect of the client interface, enhance connectivity via the http protocol, and make changes to the management of the Data Source Hub.

ProClarity Consulting Services
ProClarity's services team ensures the delivery of a ProClarity solution that not only meets the expectations of both users and IT today, but can adapt with your organization as it grows over time. There are 3 major options for implementing ProClarity Analytic Solutions.

Install & Go: This approach takes our robust analytic features and implements them within a short period of time, delivering immediate results and return on investment.

Tailored: is the second approach which requires certain pieces of functionality within ProClarity to be adapted to meet the specific requirements of specific user needs.

Fully customized: ProClarity Analytics sees our consulting team work with your organization to fully customize your analytic solution using the ProClarity SDK.

For more information contact sales@netprotechnologies.com