By Praveen Ramesh

Syncfusion added support for ActivePivot visualization with our latest release. This white paper discusses this integration and how it can benefit you.

QuartetFS' ActivePivot is one of the leading OLAP server products offering a greatly optimized in-memory computation engine with a high-performance view of transactional data. ActivePivot's visualization is usually done from within ActivePivot’s Web site; however, many Syncfusion customers would like to integrate ActivePivot visualization into their own Web (ASP.NET, ASP.NET.MVC, Silverlight) and Windows (Windows Forms, WPF) applications.

This white paper includes:

· How Syncfusion added support for ActivePivot in our BI controls: Essential Grid, Chart, and Client.

· How this support provides great flexibility in incorporating ActivePivot data in custom applications.

· Links to two online demos for Silverlight and ASP.NET.

Down the free white paper and see the online demos.

Business intelligence (BI) is not currently available for the masses—even though the technology and hardware is. However, I see this changing because organizations of all sizes have been accumulating large amounts of data…data that must be analyzed to be fully leveraged.

With that said, the future of business intelligence is the SMB market (small to medium businesses). Business and technology decision makers in the SMB space see Microsoft as driving the BI market and making it an affordable option for them.

What do application vendors need to know about the SMB space to be successful?

AMI-Partners' recent “U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook” study found cloud-based SMB solutions for business intelligence/business analytics will become more available to SMBs—thus driving investments. Specifically, the study estimates SaaS bundled options for business intelligence and analytics will increase by 25% annually through 2015 to reach $500 million.

For SMBs, the cloud takes away some of the management headaches associated with information. I see Microsoft Azure as playing a key role in SMB cloud computing moving ahead—that is why all Syncfusion components and controls currently support Azure or have support for Azure on their short-term road map.

Application vendors in the SMB marketplace need to support as many back ends as possible and be agnostic about what kind of data sources customers have in place. Data today is scattered in multiple containers—databases, Microsoft Excel files, Microsoft Word documents, custom reports and text files to name a few.

At Syncfusion, one of our key focus areas (for the last decade) has been ensuring that data in all commonly used business formats is easily available for further processing. Our work with business intelligence dovetails with work that we have already done on data processing and reporting.

Today’s BI solutions are easier to deploy and deliver quicker results. However, in order to be successful, the most important factor to consider is a company’s business goals. The need to avoid GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) rings especially true in business intelligence.

Syncfusion started with a simple goal–to produce and actively support enterprise-class Microsoft .NET software components. When we started, the .NET platform was young and there was a lot of discussion about its future. Syncfusion’s core group of engineers had worked for years with C++, specifically the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) environment. Battle hardened as they were by unresolved symbols, memory leaks, out-of-date pre-compiled headers, and the many quirks of the Win32 platform, they saw .NET as a breath of fresh air. There was little doubt in their minds that the .NET platform would profoundly change Windows development and change it for the better.

Over the next 10 years, the .NET platform did change Windows development. Developer productivity soared. Components became first-class citizens and promoted reuse in a manner that was not easily possible until then. Syncfusion was fortunate to be a part of this revolution. In many ways, we had front-row seats. Each new release of the platform and our own products brought additional challenges and opportunities to our doorstep. We went from shipping one product on one platform (our grid control on Windows Forms) to shipping 20 products on 6 different platforms (the latest addition being Windows Phone 7). We ventured beyond user interface controls into markets such as reporting and business intelligence. We have been truly privileged to be a part of the .NET eco-system for the past 10 years and to have participated in its tremendous growth.

While we added products, gained thousands of customers, and ventured into new areas, our values did not change–our model of interactive development continues to be at the heart of everything we do. New customers are always pleasantly surprised by how we react to bug reports and feature requests. They tell us they are impressed with our unwavering commitment to ensuring speedy resolution even when the cost to Syncfusion is high, and they are surprised by the depth and completeness of prototypes that our technical teams provide. They love it when we attend web meetings and work for hours to resolve issues that show up only under special environments that are virtually impossible to create  in any other scenario. While we offer the widest set of business components on the market today, nothing defines Syncfusion more to our customers than our model of interactive development. This is something we will improve and enhance over the coming 10 years and will never change or compromise.

As a company, we believe that the component market is still young. There are many, many miles to go. We are firmly committed to this market and our customers. We recently shipped a complete HTML5-based diagramming solution and a complete suite of controls for the Windows Phone 7 platform. We were the first vendor to produce a truly enterprise quality standards-based reporting solution for the .NET platform. As I write this, we are preparing to ship one of our biggest releases yet– Syncfusion Essential Studio 2011 Volume 3. We are not slowing down anytime soon. You can expect to see solid releases every quarter—releases that provide more and more building blocks for all of your software development needs.

Thank you for reading and supporting us all these years. We look forward to working with you.

Our Business Intelligence suite has become very popular in the past few years.  It seems like we have hit a nerve- customers are telling us they want business intelligence, but don’t want a large enterprise application.  Something simple, something they can imbed into their own application and follow their own look and feel.  Often, they just want a bit more control.

If you have been thinking along these lines, take a quick look at our offering. 

Our Controls:

• Support ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight

• Are very lightweight

• Allow you to skin them as you wish

• Support SSAS and XMLA

Essential Report Viewer

Essential Report Viewer is a rendering component for displaying reports defined in Microsoft’s RDL format (2008 or 2008 R2) in both WPF and Silverlight applications. Using Report Viewer, you can display tabular, graphical, or free-form reports that make use of relational, multidimensional, XML, and object data sources. Report Viewer supports both server and client reports.  See details.

Essential DocIO

• Built-in Styles for Word 2007 and 2010 for tables

• Updating TOC

Essential XlsIO

• Template Markers