Board software

Board software

Developer(s)	BOARD International
Initial release	1994
Stable release	Board 11 / 09 May 2019
Repository	https://www.board.com/en/capabilities#gref
Written in	HTML5
Website	https://www.board.com/

Board is a software solution for Corporate Performance Management, Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics, provided by BOARD International both as SaaS or on-premise version. Combining strategic, financial and operational planning with analysis, reporting and simulation in a single decision-making platform.

Thanks to the programming-free approach, users can easily create their applications without coding.

General

Board is a unified platform for decision-making that integrates business intelligence, advanced analytics, planning and simulation capabilities into a single environment. These capabilities work in concert to provide the fastest and easiest way to build highly customized applications for both strategical, financial and operational decision-making processes.

Board mainly provides solutions for:

• Reporting and interactive dashboarding;
• Ad-hoc analysis and data discovery;
• Predictive analytics and simulation;
• Budgeting, planning and forecasting;
• Profitability modeling and optimization;
• Scorecarding and strategy management;
• Financial consolidation

Board can help different departments and job roles (CFOs, CIOs. CTOs, CEOs, and generally any executives, top managers, controllers, buyers, operational managers, etc, across the entire organization to solve their varied business challenges, enhancing their decision-making processes. Board offers any business unit or individual inside a company the tools to translate their expertise into actionable insights and to address their planning and analysis’ needs, from the Office of Finance to Sales and Marketing, from Supply Chain Management to the HR department, from the IT to Operations.

The Board platform can provide support to decision-making processes of pretty much any industry, such as banking and financial services, insurance, fashion retail, grocery, discrete or process manufacturing, chemicals, automotive, healthcare and pharma, energy and utilities, oil & gas, professional services, telecommunications, I.C.T., food & beverage, restaurant services and chains, legal, construction, government and public sector, education, transport & logistics, tourism & entertainment, non-profit, and so on.

Architecture and History

Architecture - Overview

Board merges data analysis and simulation into the planning, workflow and controlling cycles of organizations; transforming data into insights, insights into predictions, predictions into plans and plans into traceable and monitored actions at a strategic, financial and operational level. All solutions created in Board share the following elements:

• Single logical view of data;
• Single and shared metadata across all types of solutions (BI, Planning, Simulation, Analytics);
• Single user interface;
• Single security;
• Single administrative environment;
• Single visual modeling environment;

The result is a platform in which any change to the data, data-model, security profiles or business rules is immediately propagated to every application, offering ease of use and a Single Version of the Truth (SVoT) across the entire organization.

History

Since its first release, in 1994, the Board platform has been conceived by Board International as a software to help organizations gain actionable and meaningful insights and take better decisions: from data collection to information analysis; from goal-setting to decision-making; from operational execution to results monitoring.

In 1997 the release of Board 4.0 introduced the “toolkit” approach: Board provides all the tools required to create and update databases, data presentations, analyses and process models, in a single visual and interactive environment, making it easy for business users to quickly build customized analytic, planning and simulation applications, which Board calls capsules. “Board Capsules” are containers that can accommodate any Board object: reports, graphs, spreadsheets, folders, maps, point-and-click filters, gauges and navigation menus. In 2000 the first Board web version appeared and in 2005 the ROLAP technology was integrated in Board 5.5. In 2009 the software was totally rewritten using the latest .NET technology, therefore releasing Board 7. In 2011 the Board platform started to be based on a new proprietary in-memory data management technology, called HBMP, “Hybrid Bitwise Memory Pattern”. The hybrid nature provides the ability to manage data in three different ways; Full in memory (All processing is performed against data held in-memory); On-demand in-memory (Determine which subset of data to use in-memory and which to store on disk); Hybrid in-memory (Use the data indices and mapping in-memory but store the rest of the data on disk).

In 2014-2015 both the Board BEAM, the embedded Predictive Analytics engine of Board, and the SaaS version of the software – Board Cloud – were released.

In 2016-2017 the Board 10 and 10.1 appeared, bringing relevant new features such as Self-Service Data Preparation capability, Natural Language Recognition (NLR) and Generation (NLG), Search Generated Analytics, Storytelling and In-context functions, new User Interface (including a modern Tile Menu with touchscreen usability).

A new release of the platform was planned for the end of 2018. BOARD 11 embeds a new DB Engine, called “Wave”, significantly enhancing the software performances, such as speed, scalability and simplicity.

International recognition

Board is included in different Gartner Magic Quadrants with the same product: Financial Planning and Analytics ; Financial Consolidation ; Business Intelligence Magic Quadrants. Among the several international recognitions of Board, the platform has been named Leader in the 2019 CPM Technology Value Matrix by Nucleus Research ; appreciated by G2 Crowd reviews both for BI and CPM. Furthermore, Board has taken top rank for reporting functionality in BARC The future of reporting Survey 2019 ; and in Dresner Advisory Business Intelligence Market Study 2019 .

The Board platform is also certificated as “Swiss Made” software by SwissMadeSoftware.org , the Swiss authority that verifies products and services meet specified criteria to carry the relevant label under Swiss law.

References

This article "Board software" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace.