MS BI conference 10: ProClarity

A woman who was formerly from ProClarity, now a product manager in the Performance Point Server group, presented this session on ProClarity.

"Interface to insight" - answering the WHY? in BI.

Tools for decision makers to explore large amounts of data and get rapid insight.

Simple data navigation, powerful calculations, and advanced visualizations of data.

Reports tell you what happened. Dashboards tell you what is happening now, and ProClarity Analytics helps understand Why it is happening.

ProClarity Analytics Server (PAS) is an IIS App. There is also a SQL database of business metadata. The clients are thin-client web-based, thick client web-based (ActiveX control), and Windows-based thick client.

This product, to me, addresses a lot of the "last mile" gap between SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and stuff, and the user.

the KPI builder helps make calculated measures with no MDX at all, easily, and publish to the PAS.

Advanced visualizations: heat map, like spaceMonger, shows boxes stacked together, with the size indicating one measure (sales amount), and the colour indicating another KPI (profit margin, good/warning/bad).

Decomposition tree - view a measure, break it down by category, then by another dimension, and so on. Hard to describe, cool to see.

She was great - perfect balance of architecture slides to show how the thing fits together, with lots of demo time with the product itself.