Data analytics platform update adds IoT capabilities

“The 4.0 release is feature-rich across the board, making Envision more capable, refined and easy to use. Users will immediately see an enhanced user experience,” said Yeshwant Mummaneni, Senior Vice President Analytics. “In addition, with version 4.0 we focused on strengthening the platform with core enhancements that include Smart Joins, Targeted Filtering and Multi-Level Aggregations. We are really excited to deliver to our customers and partners the most comprehensive cloud BI platform yet.”

“Envision 4.0 is a significant release for us as a partner,” said Brian Lassiter, Milsoft Utility Solutions. “With 4.0 and its real time data refresh, our utility clients now have the option to visualise dashboards showing current outage locations, dispatched crews, customers affected, and more relevant KPI’s, all in one view and in real time. In their business, it is imperative to know what is happening right now.”

Key updates in the Envision 4.0 release include:

• Smart joins
  To help business users easily combine data from multiple sources, Envision 4.0 introduces Smart Joins to combine multiple data sources without the need to understand the nuances of classical SQL joins. This powerful capability of joining multiple fact tables along multiple dimensions will allow users to plot metrics from multiple data sources on a single chart.
• Multi-level aggregation
  In addition to the standard aggregation/rollup (SUM, MIN, AVG, STD, etc.) functions, advanced aggregation capabilities enable user to roll data to level 'A' using a certain aggregation function, and then further rollup to level 'B' using a different aggregation function. The aggregation dimension path is intelligently picked up from the charts aggregation levels to further simplify usage.
• Real-time
  Envision’s real-time data refresh via user specified refresh time interval or via a Rest API notification support several IoT use cases. This real-time experience is expanded to enable a collaborative realisation of analytical projects by a team. The changes to the reports, dashboards and charts are synced up in real-time across all active authors and viewers.
• Refinements to user experience
  Envision offers comprehensive BI capabilities in an extremely easy-to-use solution. It has one of the fastest data to dashboard experience, with the fewest amount of clicks. This experience is further refined with new context-sensitive chart properties and n-level deep Undo/Redo stack. This release also features Bookmarks – providing users a shortcut to most commonly used combination of dashboard filters, and the ability to share these bookmarks. Finally, the new targeted filtering allows users to link measures/metrics with dashboard filters providing fine grained control on how and what aspects of charts and dashboards react to certain filters.
• Admin tools and connectors
  Envision is packed with Enterprise features. Envision 4.0 strengthens the cloud, on-premises and embedded capabilities required by enterprises and ISV’s. These capabilities include the ability to schedule reports, receive notifications upon data refresh, additional O-Auth based authentication option, big data support for Apache Spark and SalesForce.com connector. This release also enables authoring capabilities of Envision in embedded mode. A comprehensive redesign of user, data, services, security and app management makes admin tasks easier.