LANSA Developing Business Intelligence Tool
March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie
LANSA is rolling out a new Web-based business intelligence tool. Dubbed LANSA BI, the new offering is based on an underlying analytics engine from Yellowfin and will be targeted predominantly at IBM i shops looking to give users greater access to actionable data.
LANSA has used its fourth-generation language (4GL) development environment as a springboard for many other technological endeavors over the years. From Web and mobile modernization environments to application and data integration tools, from ecommerce engines to ERP suite, the Downers Grove, Illinois, company has been there and done that.
It has even offered customers some rudimentary query and reporting capability along the way in the form of LANSA Client, a Windows-based product that it included with other offerings. But up to this point, the company has lacked a full-fledged business intelligence (BI) and analytics offering that can run with the big boys.
That gap in the product lineup will soon be filled by LANSA BI. The new offering, which is currently being tested by LANSA customers, will give the vendor a fully capable, Web-based analytics and BI suite that can compete with the likes of Microsoft PowerBI, Tableau, Qlik, and Looker.
LANSA BI is based on a SQL query engine developed by Yellowfin, a Melbourne, Australia-based BI provider founded by Glen Rabie in 2003. Yellowfin developed a solid reputation for its platform and application-neutral BI product that wasn’t owned and controlled by a tech giants.
Over the years, Yellowfin amassed thousands of customers in 75 countries around the world. All told, the BI product was used by 3 million end users, Rabie says. In early 2022, he sold Yellowfin to Idera, the same company that snapped up LANSA in 2019, for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition turned out to be prescient for LANSA. Company leaders had been thinking they needed to improve their data analytic capabilities. The LANSA Client provided some functionality, but it lacked certain amenities. When they realized that Idera owned a BI and analytics offering via one of LANSA’s sister companies, they decided to take a closer look.
“It not only fit the bill, but it also went beyond that,” says Andrew Vaiciunas, a senior sales engineer with LANSA. “It really is an awesome product.”
Yellowfin’s analytics offering was developed in Java and typically runs on Windows and Linux platforms (although LANSA will consider running it on IBM i). The product enables business analysts to conduct standard analytic functions, such as connecting to data sources, preparing data for analysis, and creating reports and dashboards. It also supports additional functionality, such as automated insights, threshold-based alerting, and “closed loop” analytics that allow users to take actions directly from dashboards. Yellowfin also supports embedded deployments, which will come in handy with the new LANSA integration.
Yellowfin forms the starting point for LANSA BI, which will feature Yellowfin functionality under the covers, but will be packaged up and integrated with other LANSA products, says Mike Mahan, global sales director for LANSA.
“We’re taking that engine and basically leveraging it from within LANSA,” Mahan tells IT Jungle. “When we formally announce the product, which we expect at COMMON [POWERUp 2023], you’ll see LANSA BI and underneath there will be a little ‘Powered by Yellowfin’ in the logo.”
The first proof of concept for LANSA BI involved one of LANSA’s ERP Frameworks customers. According to Vaiciunas, by integrating LANSA BI with the customer’s ERP software, the customer is able to access dashboards and create their own ad hoc reports against their own database directly from within the ERP software.
Yellowfin has all the basics covered when it comes to BI. What really has the LANSA folks excited is its natural language query (NLQ) capability, which will enable users to construct queries in plain English as opposed to learning to program in SQL. NLQ is expected to be heavily adopted in IBM i shops that lack deep analytics expertise, Vaiciunas says.
“As an end user, someone who doesn’t know anything about databases can say ‘Hey, give me the gross profit for all my divisions for last quarter,’ and it will just come up and give you a table of all that or a graph of all that. It’ll just show you that.”
Once that report is created via NLQ, it can be saved and built upon and customized later. That will give users the ability to extend and customize their analytics journey over time, Vaiciunas says.
“I can go back into that report . . . and say I want to extend this. Maybe I want to have some clickthrough capacity and say ‘Hey, when I click on each quarter, I really want to go into the details of that quarter.’ So I can connect that to another report that I may have created also.”
Many LANSA users today are burdened by a reliance on manual data analytics methods, says LANSA Marketing Manager Nichole Ballesteros. According to a regular survey that Ballesteros runs, the organizations are relying heavily on things like Excel and manually building reports, she says. The goal with LANSA BI is to automate more of that work and make the LANSA customers more productive.
“It’s a lot of work for them and it’s prone to error,” Ballesteros says. “They’re not using new and advanced technologies that really empower everyone in the organization to properly use and leverage data they way modern data business are using it, to propel their business.”
Yellowfin’s NLQ capability, in particular, is expected to boost the capability of organizations to make better use of that day. “We are giving them this technology that will help them actually leverage data and analytics,” she says.
LANSA is clearly bullish on the potential for the Yellowfin technology to help its customers base. While it doesn’t appear that Yellowfin had a ton of IBM i customers, it did provide IBM i as an optional data source in one of the product’s drop-down menu, Vaiciunas. “As soon as I threw a JDBC driver into the ‘400, it immediately said ‘OK hit me up,’” he says.
The broad outlines of the LANSA BI product offering are already set. What’s yet to be determined are some of the implementation and usage details. Will LANSA customers prefer to hit the live Db2 for i database with the Yellowfin query engine, or will they opt to ETL the data to a separate database? Will that database be another instance of Db2 for i? Good old SQL Server? A dedicated analytics database like Exasol or maybe Snowflake in the cloud? And what about running the Yellowfin engine directly on IBM i?
In the meantime, LANSA is eager to get customers playing with LANSA BI and giving feedback to the company on what features are important to them and what direction to take the product. The software will be formally announced next month at COMMON POWERUp 2023, with general availability expected later this year. For more information, contact the vendor at www.lansa.com.
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