P2 Energy Solutions
announces the release of Excalibur Report Studio
(ERS). ERS is a desktop application that will completely
transform the way that business users access, analyze and report
data out of the Excalibur Energy Management System. Built upon
the Microsoft .NET
framework, ERS is a tool designed to extract data directly
from the UniData
database and structure the data in a normalized format, so
that third-party reporting packages can be utilized to deliver
the information to the end-user and provide greater business
intelligence capabilities. As a starting point, ERS is integrated
with Crystal Reports® Developer XI from Business Objects.
"Crystal Reports is probably the most popular reporting tool on
the market," said Mark Eikermann, senior vice president of
development for P2
Energy Solutions
. "It made perfect sense to choose Crystal as the preferred
report writer under which to build ERS."
The new and unique characteristic of ERS is its direct
interaction with the UniData database
. In the past, companies had external access to UniData
using an ODBC access layer. This not only created more
complexity, but these tools were confining from a reporting
standpoint. Using proprietary technology to transform the data
into a normalized view, ERS eliminates the complexity to bridge
the gap between UniData and today's popular reporting
applications, opening additional opportunities and capabilities
to all users. ERS is architected so that knowledge workers can
utilize the full capabilities of today's best reporting tools
which are richly endowed with charts, graphs and analytical
capabilities.
"ERS will be particularly attractive to our customer base for
a number of core reasons," says Darrell Jones, executive vice
president, P2
Energy Solutions
. "The first is the robust flexibility of the product
including powerful analytical capabilities, presentation quality
appearance of the reports, and multiple report deployment
options; the second, a dramatic improvement in speed compared to
ODBC access; and third, the reduced amount of maintenance because
ERS operates directly on UniData data tables using the native
dictionary definitions (including any customer unique dictionary
items) which eliminates ODBC schema administration."
The potential of ERS is well recognized by existing Excalibur
clients, who are enthusiastic to be on the vanguard and
participate in the beta testing scheduled to conclude by July 1.
Because ERS is designed to directly access the UniData database,
the tool is product agnostic. ERS can be valuable for any
application running on UniData, not only Excalibur. "There is
nothing like ERS on the market," continued Mark Eikermann. "ERS
will work with any application that uses the UniData database
which greatly expands the potential market. That said, our first
focus is to continue to add value for our Excalibur clients with
well thought out research and development efforts."