Customer Success - ProfitBase

ProfitBase® Empowers Information Workers to Make Better and Faster Decisions Using Graphic User Interfaces Built On NetAdvantage®

In the age of acquisitions, consolidation and best of breed IT adoption, most businesses have accumulated and are now dependent on many different business systems. This means important performance data is scattered across these systems and is difficult to find. As a result, management obtains a somewhat distorted, incomplete and most likely dated picture of performance by piecing together information from each business system.

ProfitBase offers business intelligence (BI) solutions that consolidate the important data from these systems and provides users with one view of the information that is important to them. That means decision makers have the right information at the right time so they make better and faster decisions. In building their ProfitBase 2007 software, ProfitBase was looking for the most advanced software tools to build a useful, robust Graphical User Interface (GUI). After some shopping around, ProfitBase decided to standardize on Infragistics NetAdvantage® for .NET and NetAdvantage for WPF to reduce their software development effort and at the same time create the best possible user experience for their clients.

The Challenge

ProfitBase 2007 delivers ready to use business analytics, business system connectivity and a rapid configuration data warehouse tool that empowers information workers with one consolidated view of the information they need for better and faster decisions. The application is built on top of the .NET platform and utilizes Windows Forms for a rich client. An ASP.NET web client is also employed for gathering intelligence. In the past year, ProfitBase also decided to use Microsoft® Windows Presentation Foundation for many of the more graphical parts, including navigational menus, within the application.

The complexity of a business intelligence application requires countless man-hours to extract data across source systems and develop the business logic of the application. ProfitBase understood that a consistent user-friendly UI was fundamental to the success of the configuration and deployment of BI solutions. To save development time on the UI, the company decided to look for a UI component vendor that could deliver the power to develop their rich user experience while ensuring styling ease and consistency throughout the development cycle.

"Development of a product with this many facets is complex and time consuming," said Terje Rugland, CTO and VP of Development at ProfitBase. "In order to save development time and money, we wanted to standardize on a component vendor that gave us UI tools that were highly flexible and allowed us to create an effective, immersive user experience for our end users. That's why we chose Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET."

The Solution

NetAdvantage for .NET empowers developers to build and style exceptional application interfaces and user experiences across multiple platforms. Infragistics' feature-rich solutions help enterprises deploy a strategy as part of the application development lifecycle for developing the user experience.

"We've standardized on NetAdvantage because it provides coverage for GUI components across multiple platforms which allows us to concentrate on making the application itself better while NetAdvantage ensures consistency, styling and usability in the interface," said Rugland. "Our strategy is to depend on Infragistics for external GUI components so that our developers continue to leverage the same skill set."

ProfitBase utilizes many of the UI components in NetAdvantage including WinTree™, WinGrid™, WinListview™, WinTab™ and calendar controls. "We developed a data viewer using one of the NetAdvantage components. The core functionality was already there in NetAdvantage. We only needed to add some surrounding functionality to bring data in and add a few additional functions. This saved us many months of development work and subsequent support," added Rugland.

ProfitBase also strives to take advantage of new and emerging technologies to deliver the best user experience. "We've been using Windows Forms for a number of years as part of the application, but then WPF was released and provided us with so many more options for the GUI. We wanted to give those capabilities to the application," commented Rugland.

NetAdvantage for WPF affords developers great flexibility in styling making it easier to achieve limitless potential in the UI. NetAdvantage for WPF is the only WPF control toolset on the market today with Visual Studio® 2008 support for the controls needed by developers to fulfill line of business requirements like Office® ribbon navigation, charting and high performance data grid. "With NetAdvantage for WPF, Infragistics has demonstrated that they keep up with new releases and new technologies and that’s why we decided to standardize on Infragistics," said Rugland.

The Success

Rugland credits NetAdvantage for moving his products to market faster by saving hundreds of man-hours during the development cycle. Typical development of new product versions now take six to nine months because Rugland said, "NetAdvantage takes care of creating a consistent look and feel in the UI as we add elements to the product. We did the UI once and now we don’t have to do it again."

NetAdvantage for .NET is sold on a subscription basis entitling customers to three product releases in a year. "It's very easy to justify the license fee. Without the NetAdvantage subscription, we'd spend more time maintaining the application which would affect our time to market and may result in loss of sales. That made our decision to go with NetAdvantage pretty simple."

For more information about Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET and the controls described in this success story please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage.aspx