Roambi for SAS Ratchets Up the Integration Factor

It was only a matter of time before Mellmo, developer of the Roambi ES3 mobile business intelligence application, got around to integrating it with SAS BI.

Roambi for SAS

Now that it has, however, Santiago Becerra, chairman and cofounder of Mellmo, told CRM Buyer that the wait was worthwhile.

“This is our tightest integration with a BI application yet,” he said.

What that means for the end-user is that certain functions, such as interactive charts or automatic identification of hierarchies, deploy automatically without prompting from the user as sometimes is necessary in other integrations.

In other ways, however, this latest version, expected to roll out April 7, looks remarkably similar to the integrations with, say, Oracle, or SAP or Microsoft.

It is optimized for an iPhone and iPad. It serves up several detailed views of BI data. Its integration is also data-agnostic. So if a company is running not only SAS, but also Salesforce.com and Google Docs, data from those systems can be used as well.

Roambi for SAS

Roambi for SAS allows users to access the Roambi app with the same credentials used to sign onto the SAS account, Becerra explained.

If they bother to think about it at all, end-users don’t necessarily factor in that Roambi is the app on the mobile device through which they are using SAS. All of Roambi’s BI integrations are essentially that — integrations to these complex applications that allow data to be rendered on a mobile device.

However, the users are in fact entering the BI system through the Roambi interface. The app connects them to the Roambi server, which is linked to the SAS server. The integration happens at that point, Becerra said.

In SAS’ case, the integration is the tightest yet, as he pointed out. In addition, SAS holds a lot of analytics on its servers that also generate valuable insights for users.

iPad 2, Yes. Xoom and PlayBook? Maybe

Right now, Mellmo is focusing its development work on Apple devices, with the iPad — and now the iPad 2 — the main targets, given how well they render charts and graphs.

Other tablets do so as well, but Becerra is only half-committed to the concept of expanding to Motorola’s Xoom or RIM’s PlayBook, when it is available.

“The design and development opportunities with the iPad are so huge that it is hard to look elsewhere right now,” he said, pointing to the large uptake of the iPad in corporations as another factor. “We are in research mode regarding a decision about Xoom or PlayBook.”