I recently returned from a trip to Germany where visted a Bissantz, a relatively small company in Nürnburg that develops and markets an interesting reporting and data visualization tool named DeltaMaster that works with Oracle OLAP (and other data sources). I was very impressed with this tool. There are few things that I really liked about it:
- It's very good at displaying a lot of information within a single report. One of the ways that it does this is by mixing graphical representations of data with numerical representation (they are very big on something called 'Sparklines'). This makes it very easy to create a single report that includes data on, for example, sales for the current quarter but also provides indications of sales trends and shares.
- The presentation of data is very clean. While the reports themselves are very sophisticated, the developers have done a terrific job of presenting them to users. The presentation tends to be more functional than fluffy, but it's done very well. It is easy on the eyes.
- DeltaMaster goes way beyond basic cross tabs and charts. There are prebuilt reports / analysis templates for rankings, concentration analysis, portfolio analysis, etc. There's quite a few different types of pre-built analysis and I won't try to do justice to them here. See for yourself.
- It works better on OLAP than tables. I'm obviously biased when it comes to this topic, but for the end user this means more analytic power and flexibility.
Below is a concentration analysis report. This is along the lines of a Pareto chart. There are many different types of built-in analysis, but this one looks nice in the confined space of this blog's page.
Here are some links:
The DeltaMaster page at Bissantz: http://www.bissantz.com/products/
A clever blog by Bella, the Bissantz company dog: http://www.bella-consults.com/
Bella, if you happen to find your way to this blog, here's a 'hello' from Henry (the OLAP product manager's dog).
