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Roambi Mobile BI Walks a Narrow Line but Digs Deep

Mellmo's Roambi ES3

Mellmo’s Roambi ES3 Mobile Business Intelligence App

Many mobile apps for CRM tend to deliver comprehensive versions of the original application. For example, one can use the mobile Salesforce.com app on a mobile device to carry out just about any CRM-related function that’s possible using the enterprise version on a PC — from monitoring the pipeline to contacting a lead.

Not so with Mellmo’s Roambi ES3, a mobile application that focuses exclusively on business intelligence data. Users can access the BI functionality of one of four major applications with which it integrates — SAP, IBM, Microsoft and now, Oracle — via the iPhone or iPad.

Not surprisingly, given its narrow focus, Roambi ES3 goes deeper thanother mobile apps that offer an element of BI. Roambi serves up six– soon to be seven — detailed views of BI data.

Roambi ES3 also is following the same trend that has beencharacterizing BI software in the enterprise for the last few years:The developer has made it as simple as possible to use.

“We are a mobile analytics tool,” Quinton Alsbury, Mellmo cofounderand president, told CRM Buyer. “The app takes business data andtransforms it into interactive dashboards that are delivered to theiPad or iPhone or iPod touch with minimal effort on the part of theuser.”

Integrating With Oracle

The latest product the company has introduced is an app that integrates withOracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, which debutedat Oracle OpenWorld.

The app connects users directly to Oracle’s EssBase — an OLAP(Online Analytical Processing) Server that is part of Oracle BI’sfoundation.

The app also taps into Oracle’s user and file management and its securitystructure, including role level and row level security. Itintegrates with the Hyperion Workspace portal, allowing users to transform Excel spreadsheets stored in the portal into mobile dashboard views.

6 Different Visualizations

Most users tend to focus on the client, which contains sixmini analytic applications that slice and dice the data in differentways, explained Alsbury.

“The client talks to the Roambi enterpriseserver, which is installed behind the firewall,” he said. “It then hooks into theOracle database, which then takes the necessary data to populate themobile visualization.”

The six different visualizations include a trends view, which is ahigh-level dashboard for looking at different performance indicators;a pie view; a high-end drill down navigation visualization forhierarchal data; a table browser that converts spreadsheets; avisualization that takes tabulated data and renders it into a virtualfile draw (“instead of looking at rows and rows of data they areturned into virtual cards,” said Alsbury); and a visualization for theiPad, which lets the user compare five of those cards with each other.

The company plans to introduce a seventh view soon.

Other Roambi ES3 integrations include SAP Crystal Reports, SAPBusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services, MicrosoftSharepoint, Salesforce CRM, LifeRay, Google Docs and Microsoft Excel.

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