BOARD provides a combined business intelligence and corporate performance management platform. The BI capability embraces reporting, multi-dimensional analysis, ad-hoc querying and dashboards. This is combined with the CPM functions of management and monitoring of performance planning, including budgeting, planning, forecasting, profitability analysis, scorecards and financial consolidation.
The toolkit approach adopted by BOARD is claimed to satisfy most BI and CPM requirements without the need for any sort of programming. The tools support a highly scalable multidimensional database, data reading and transformation tools (ETL), application user interface environment (client and web), security and a multi-tier architecture for system delivery. Having seen the capability of the toolkit approach, it is indeed extremely felxible and caters for complex logic, calculations and access to bespoke data sources. In fact there may just be some level of semantics going on here. If a user needs to include a complex formula (Black Scholes for example) then the code can be created within BOARD – and it is still code – albeit within the toolkit supplied by BOARD.
Self service analytics are provisioned through the toolkit approach and “BOARD Capsules” are containers which can accommodate any BOARD object: reports, graphs, spreadsheets, folders, carousels, simulation models, dashboards and navigation menus. These objects can be freely positioned on the screen with a simple drag & drop from the ribbon bar and interactively configured. They are immediately synchronised with each other and with the database and they automatically react to users’ actions.
The technology itself is advanced with a number of innovative features. HBMP (Hybrid Bitwise Memory Pattern) – implements mapping data at the bit level, for data compression, parallelism and concurrency. Three modes of memory usage – full in-memory, on-demand in-memory, hybrid in-memory, mean that the most appropriate use of memory is made regardless of the task at hand. The whole architecture is based on SOA with four user interfaces – BOARD 8.1 client, MS-Excel Add-in, mobile devices (Windows 8 tablet and iPad) and web browser client.