BI vendor "WebFOCUS" development of a long-established vendor substitutes-the prospect of the new CEO talks

BI vendor "WebFOCUS" development of a long-established vendor substitutes-the prospect of the new CEO talks

Infomation Builders is a long-standing independent BI (business intelligence) vendor founded in 1975. It is an unlisted private company and started on the mainframe version "FOCUS" as an EUC tool, and currently has a track record of being adopted by companies in various industries and other fields around the world, with the core product "BIFO Foundation WebFOCUS".

In January 2019, the founder Gerald Cohen changed to Frank Vella as the chief executive officer (CEO), and became the first alternative since its inception. Mr. Vella joined in May 2017 as Chief Operating Officer (COO). He has worked for BlueJeans Network, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Virtustream, Quest Software, Microsoft and others.
This time, I asked Vella, who is in charge of new management, about the future of Infomation Builders.

--Are there any major changes in future management policies?

First of all, I would like to firmly protect the root of the success Gerald has built up. Specifically, there are three points: "Innovation," "Customer First," and "Employee Satisfaction." We believe that these balances will continue to be important in the future. For example, while promoting innovation by using agile methods and cloud platforms for software development, we will create an attractive and comfortable environment for employees.

Similarly, we will maintain the same relationship with the customer experience. Because building a BI infrastructure is complex and time-consuming to implement, incorporating microservices and other architectures makes it easier to access technology. In addition, we are considering the improvement of usability by modern UI and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

-How do you view market trends on a global basis?

Emerging BI vendors are often focused on end users. Infomation Builders focuses on the enterprise market, and considers scalability to serve large users as important. It also requires integration with complex data sources and business applications.

As an example for large-scale users, the NTT Group has adopted WebFOCUS as a reporting basis for the group common accounting system, and more than 100,000 people from 53 group companies use it. The WebFOCUS license is provided on a per CPU core basis, and the number of users is unlimited, enabling it to handle such large-scale deployments. Enterprise-class high availability and flexible security settings were also evaluated.

The relationship between companies and data is changing with the times. In the past, data sources were limited and the number of users was low, but nowadays a large amount of data comes from a variety of sources, and efforts based on company-wide deployment are becoming active.

As organizations grow in size, it becomes difficult to ensure consistency and integrity. Companies have one truth and make decisions based on that. In order to realize this, Infomation Builders uses three "i" as keywords: "integration", "integrity" and "intelligence".

--How do you capture the Japanese market? Please tell me about your future strategy.

I feel it is a very large, stable and mature market. We believe there are still growth opportunities for WebFOCUS and we want to bring more support and solutions to the market.

We also emphasize the relationship with our partners. In Japan, Assist is the sole distributor of WebFOCUS. The partnership between Infomation Builders and Assist dates back to 1981 when it began working with mainframe versions of FOCUS. In 1997, WebFOCUS started selling in Japan, and worked on product verification, sales, support and education.

Also, in 2013, we launched sales of the packaged product "WebFOCUS EVO" that meets the needs of enterprise scale. This is a WebFOCUS at the core of providing self-service, reporting, peripheral functions such as security together.

As of January 2018, the number of introduced companies in Japan exceeded 1260 companies. As mentioned earlier, there is also a large-scale use such as the NTT Group. The Japanese market accounts for approximately 6 to 7% of global sales. This is even better than the same size market in Europe. I think it is the result of focusing on solutions as well as product offerings.

The relationship with the assistance spans 38 years. There are many similarities to corporate culture. I would like to continue this unique relationship in the future.