iPhone Business Intelligence Gets a "Push" Courtesy of Roambi

by Bill French on 18/07/09 at 10:00 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Time-to-awareness is critical in many business situations and Roambi has announced an upgrade to their popular iPhone app that serves up some of the finest examples of mobile data presentations I’ve ever seen. Roambi now supports Push Notifications to automate the publication of new

Roambi visualizations to ensure that mobile workers have the most accurate and up-to-date information available on their iPhone.

Roambi and made note of the importance of automation and alerting in BI scenarios. MeLLmo, the developer of Roambi, has decidedly stepped up their game with integrated push notification support. This should come as a welcomed feature to serious BI customers that care about decreasing the distribution latency of actionable information for their mobile enterprise workers.

Combined with the auto-fresh feature of Roambi Enterprise, which refreshes Roambi visualizations whenever the corresponding original report is updated, the new “push” functionality means mobile workers will always have

access to the most current information, formatted specifically for their iPhones. For example, executives who rely on daily sales or performance reports can now have Roambi visualizations of the latest key performance indicators automatically pushed to their iPhones as soon as they become available.

Security in BI is also a key requirement for enterprises and the issues with Roambi are not unique to their product. In the May product review of Roambi I speculated that it wouldn’t be surprising to find that RoamBi Viewers (native iPhone apps) may eventually be “fingerprinted” to work only with a specific instance of the Publisher (their enterprise server component); perhaps even fingerprinted to specific [certified] documents. In a follow-up interview with Roambi execs, they asked if I had hacked into their systems to get a glimpse of their technology roadmap? Apparently, my speculation was spot on – we can look forward to security innovations from this iPhone developer. If their security enhancements are half as good as their visual strengths, their security architecture will be very tight.

The latest release of Roambi is available immediately as a free download through the iTunes App Store at http://www.roambi.com/getroambi. This is a highly recommended product for serious iPhone BI users.