Plain English questions, plain English answers
The “old” business intelligence tools were built for power users and analysts, not the average user, says Steve Byrnes of nQuire Software. He believes today’s users need up-to-the-moment access to information. “Users must be able to search and see their view of the customer and performance across all channels, not just data that has been taken off the transactional system and aggregated up to a data warehouse,” he says.
Enter nQuire Answers, which allows users to get answers by simply entering questions in plain English about any subject area or topic that is logically defined to the nQuire Server. Questions are interpreted by nQuire Answers and passed to the nQuire Server for determining which data sources need to be accessed, generating optimized physical requests for these sources and performing necessary information integration and analytics.
Byrne explains Answers is something like an “Ask Jeeves” interface taken a step further. “If you type in ‘Show me sales for the Western region,’ Ask Jeeves will assemble a list of possibilities--it will find the content that has ‘sales,’ ‘Western’ and ‘region.’ We take that request and provide an answer: ‘The Western region sold $7 million.’ ”
nQuire Answers sit on top of multiple sources on multiple platforms and looks for information from any source, whether it’s a transactional system or data warehouse. The results can be enhanced through intuitive charting, result layout, calculation and drill-down capabilities, all of which are performed on the server and require no applets, plug-ins or client-side software other than a web browser. Anything created with nQuire Answers can be saved, organized, shared and integrated with other important content--such as documents, Web content and relevant external news--using nQuire portal templates. The templates can be viewed with a browser or embedded/integrated into any internal or external Web site, portal or Web application.
nQuire founder Larry Barbetta says, “Data inside the company really hasn’t benefited from the Internet revolution. For years, decision-support tools have not been mission critical. It has been OK for these systems to go down. It has been OK for data not to be loaded into the warehouse for seven days. We provide a broad new audience with a completely Internet based, user-friendly solution. They have access to timely, relevant, personalized information--and they don’t need an IT degree or an IT administrator to create it.”
At the heart of the system is a sophisticated request-generation engine, which translates plain English in a rich query to the data. Says Bryne, “The information may be found in any or all sources, such as the data warehouse, which may be aggregated every month, an operational data store that collects the most current couple of weeks worth of data or the transactional system for the current day.
“The request generator knows where to go and at what time. It’s not going to the transactional system first--you don’t it ask a question like ‘What are the sales figures for the past years.’ It’s going the data warehouse for that--but it won’t look to the warehouse for specific, very pointed, more timely questions. It goes to the transactional system.”
The price for the nQuire Server, including nQuire Answer is $125,000, plus any subscription service. There are no user charges, and the number of users is unlimited. Barbetta says this pricing structure is unique because in a typical client/server model, adding more users incurs greater cost and doesn’t necessarily encourage extending information across the enterprise.
He adds that the nQuire speed to solution is very rapid. “Most customers are up and running with a full-blown solution within a month.”