Dundas enables dashboard flexibility
Developers building business applications need flexible tools that can help them keep pace with changing end-user expectations. Rather than building a proprietary dashboard solution or accepting the limitations of other offerings, more than 800 organizations in 150 countries choose Dundas Dashboard. Using Dundas Dashboard, businesses such as Bank of America, KPMG, Microsoft, Ogilvy, Roche, Coca-Cola, AT&T and Southwest Airlines are able to deliver flexible, highly interactive dashboards that connect to traditional and Big Data sources.
Developers prefer Dundas Dashboard because its WYSIWYG dashboard layout, powerful visualizations, and C# scripting engine provide all the flexibility of an IDE with the full benefits of an enterprise BI platform. Because Dundas Dashboard runs entirely in the browser, business users can access the dashboards on any device without deployment challenges.
Dundas is among the SD Times 100 for its contributions to the User Experience category. The company also ranked No. 2 on the Dresner’s Wisdom of Crowds study again, underscoring its popularity with end users as well as developers. Dundas also received a patent for its unique approach to data consolidation and workflow.
Introducing Dundas Dashboard 5.0
Dundas Dashboard 5.0 adds support for Big Data sources. It also adds a number of industry-first improvements such as advanced usage tracking, an interactive HTML5 mobile interface and comprehensive support for MapReduce technologies. It also added Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) support for Amazon Redshift, Apache Hive, Microsoft PDW, Rackspace, Peer1, and more. Dundas’ support of so many Big Data cloud hosting providers enables more of its customers to benefit from cloud-based stability and scalability, global access using an Internet connection, quick deployment, and a lower up-front cost.
“The Big Data support allows our customers to realize better ROI from their data investments,” said Troy Marchand, Dundas president and CEO. “By aligning emerging technologies such as Big Data with customer feedback, we are able to deliver state-of-the-art data visualizations that help businesses become more competitive. Developers and end users love Dundas Dashboard because it provides the ease of use and flexibility they need to do more with data, faster.”
Dundas Dashboard 5.0 provides even faster access to data and improved report scheduling. Users can avoid the need for drill-downs and pop-ups by swapping metrics shown in the data visualizations in a single click. The new release can also provide instant e-mail notifications of important updates. Users can simply choose a report, set a schedule, and select the export format and mailing list. Export formats include PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, and image.
New chart types and mobile support also make the new release particularly compelling. The new Radar Charts enable users to quickly visualize the symmetry of values using Area, Line, Range, and Stacked Area charts. Mobile and HTML5 improvements include the ability to create advanced HTML5-based scorecards for mobile devices using the small multiples control. In addition, developers can add interactive tiles on mobile home screens to give users the data they need at a glance.
There are also custom views so users can customize their dashboards and reports for better printing and exporting results, including print-to-PDF and PowerPoint. Users now have the power to customize individual cells in the analytical grid such as highlighting cells according to business rules. Marchand said Dundas Dashboard 5.0 also makes it possible to measure ROI by tracking user’s adoption of reports.
Amazon support expands
Earlier this year, Dundas introduced support for Amazon Web Services and data visualization solutions for analyzing and presenting Big Data on Amazon Redshift. Dundas Dashboard and Amazon EC2 enable fast, scalable deployment of a data visualization website or a business dashboard portal. Dundas Dashboard and Amazon Relational Data Base Service (RDS) allow the creation of powerful data visualizations and dashboards from secure, Amazon-hosted databases. The combination of Dundas Dashboard and Amazon Redshift allows data to be quickly visualized and analyzed from a cloud-based petabyte-scale data warehouse.
“Until recently, organizations were unable to take advantage of large sets of transactional data because their traditional databases lacked the processing power,” said Marchand. “We built an Amazon Redshift connector into the Dundas default installation so organizations can quickly run queries on the data stored in Amazon Redshift and visualize the results on their dashboards.”
Accessing Redshift clusters from within Dundas Dashboard and creating a cluster is fast and easy, as is creating virtual tables, KPIs, and dashboards. Redshift allows users to balance cost and performance by adding new nodes depending on the database size and the complexity of the queries. Using Dundas Dashboard, users can limit the size of a data set using an array of for faster access to smaller sets of relevant data.
Dundas Dashboard continues its tradition of presenting data in a format that is interactive and easy to understand. Using Dundas Dashboard, users are empowered to make better business decisions.
For more information, visit www.dundas.com.
