BIReady is executing the next phase of the global roll-out of its standardized data warehouse automation solution. The mass market introduction of this business intelligence automation software is triggered by the successful implementations of the BIReady product. Following a two year evaluation period starting in 2005, the tried and tested application has been installed at the heart of the business intelligence applications of a number of customers; organizations in various industries – including health care, insurance, government and durable consumer goods – acknowledge the benefits flagged by domain experts and industry analysts.

The basic functionality remains of course; Automation of Data Warehouse processes based on best practices.
The result is not only time and costs savings and a shorter time to market, but also a very predictable, understandable and flexible solution, both with the initial development and with changes and enhancements for next increments.

New in BIReady Version 4 (highlights).
The most important improvements and new features are as follows:
1. Support for Teradata and Netezza.
BIReady now supports the following platforms: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Teradata and Netezza. Support for others (My SQL) will be added on demand. The support of Teradata and Netezza positions BIReady in the heart of the dominant Data Warehouse appliances.
2. Virtual Data marts.
Based on the same definition (meta data of the data mart) it is now possible to generate views on the enterprise data warehouse, instead of building physical dimension and fact tables. This way the data movement from the enterprise data warehouse to the data mart tables is avoided, while the advantage if simplicity of star schema design is maintained (very valuable for deploying end user tools). Of course this option is particular interesting for the DWH appliances now supported by BIReady, because of their impressing performance. But there are more solutions that can use these virtual data marts. Using the capability of BIReady to define specifications for data marts, based on the business model, one can easily define relatively small and ad hoc data marts. Since these data mart definitions may contain less attributes then a full blown star schema and filter capabilities are available to make sure the performance will be good enough even with the traditional data base management systems. Obviously this is a very valuable option during the development and prototyping phase as well.
3. Performance enhancements.
The processes generated by BIREADY MANAGER and executed by BIREADY ENGINE are tuned even more.Among others by using the power of the set based and parallel processing capabilities of the underlying database. This is realized retaining BIReady's unique capabilities of complex forms of history (history of history) and the processing of changes with retroactive effect.
Especially with the newly supported Appliances we have seen amazing performance figures!
4. User Interface Improvements.
Besides efficient updates of the user interface look and feel, BIReady users are now capable to partly set the skin themselves.
5. Workflow and reporting efficiency.
Based on the broad experience with implementations BIReady was able to capture a lot of user enhancement requests for optimizing the BIReady workflow and ease of use and the reporting and error handling capabilities.
6. Co-operation with other tools.
Several improvements have been implemented to optimize the co-operation with other tools. The already mentioned Virtual Data Marts are very helpful for more ROLAP oriented BI-tools like MicroStrategy.
On the loading part we have more openness for combinations with ETL tools.
The BIReady staging tables can easily be populated by ETL tools. A special partnership with expressor is in place to integrate semantic ETL with the BIReady metadata.
7. DW Healthcheck.
It checks the technical consistency issues that can arise for instance if a load has failed. Normally these checks will not find any error, because the BIReady processes are designed to keep the database consistent. Nevertheless we recommend to run these checks regularly as a quality procedures.

Source: www.BIReady.com