Data-intensive applications have always had reporting facilities (what's the use of pouring all that data or garbage in unless you can get it out?). But as business intelligence (BI) practices become more refined and users become accustomed to better flexibility and creative self-service, the demand for intrinsic output that's closer to BI output is on the rise. One of the finer recent accomplishments in this ar The Voyager library information system is built to manage the physical and digital media collections of research and academic libraries; it’s used at organizations including Pfizer, Children’s Hospital – Seattle, National Geographic Society, and the Library of Congress. Analyser, released in September, comes with preformatted and interactive ad-hoc designs for managing suppliers, acquisitions, circulation, lists, and even catalog printing. More importantly, it takes the old ODBC connection model — expensive to administer and maintain — and moves it to a browser interface. The Query Studio utility gives users a drag-and-drop UI for developing outputs. A Report Studio allows more expert BI types to produce more complex results.Librarians are, as a group, very metrics-oriented, and more than almost any other discipline are driven to research and examine the success and components of their work. Judging from what I’ve seen of Analyzer, it seems to do a good job of supporting that kind of iterative query. The product’s design is solid, devoid of glitz, and sports no extraneous, showy surprises that might get in the way of its basic duties. On the administrative side, the operator can run the biggest outputs overnight as scheduled processes or by triggering them manually.A future version of Analyzer will include management dashboards as an additional way to communicate dense results, continuing Voyager’s push to incorporate external BI practice as an intrinsic part of their own data-intensive system. Endeavor is not the only vendor bringing such abilities into their applications, just one of the cleverest. Voyager Analyzer Cost: Starts at $6,500 Platforms: Solaris v9 or v10, Red Hat v4 Verdict: Endeavor Voyager’s new reporting module, Analyzer, is in the vanguard for showing what can be done to deliver BI output within data-intensive environments, including a straight-ahead interface, dual interfaces with different levels of complexity for different types of users, and built-in domain expertise. Technology Industry