Altair Releases HiQube 6.0, a New-Generation Business Intelligence Solution

TROY, Mich., Jan. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc. today released version 6.0 of HiQube, its simulation-driven business intelligence (BI) and data analytics solution. HiQube 6.0 exposes the power of its unique multi-dimensional data engine to business analysts through a new, self-service Web client, customizable dashboards, unbalanced hierarchical data management, and embedded mathematical optimization for higher-level what-if analysis. Enterprise accessibility to HiQube also has been expanded to the latest Windows, Red Hat and Ubuntu desktop and server environments.

“HiQube is part of a new generation of high-performance business intelligence (BI) products that are sweeping the market,” said James R. Scapa, chairman and CEO for Altair. “It is a compelling alternative to traditional BI solutions, because it handles enormous data sets with the speed of in-memory BI product queries, without sacrificing data persistence or write-back capabilities. HiQube is distinctive in its ability to be quickly deployed as a complementary data analytics extension to incumbent business systems or as an end-to-end BI solution, providing an excellent value proposition for our customers.”

HiQube empowers stakeholders across the enterprise to independently slice, dice and drill information, explore key performance indicators (KPI's), perform math-based simulations and what-if analyses, and easily publish interactive, tailored reports and dashboards to improve business performance.  With flash-drive simplicity to install and its open-architecture design, HiQube complements and can be seamlessly deployed within any IT eco-system.

"This release marks a development milestone, centering on the user experience and advanced Web client access to broaden the power of our multi-dimensional data engine beyond the desktop to all enterprise stakeholders," said Yeshwant Mummaneni, chief technology officer for HiQube. "In this and future releases, HiQube customers will discover ever-increasing power at their fingertips to improve and guide decision-making for an ever-declining total cost of ownership."

The latest innovations in HiQube provide an enhanced portal-style layout for its Web client interface, incorporating multiple workspaces and multiple reports in each workspace. It allows for the properties of published reports to be modified, updated and saved, as well as for the creation of new charts from a published Qube and saving those charts as user reports.

HiQube 6.0 takes a leadership position among BI technologies with its ability to efficiently manage and operate on unbalanced tree structures—data structured similarly to an organizational chart with multiple branches that descend to different levels—as well as the ability to maintain parallel hierarchies. HiQube's embedded ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capabilities also have been extended, allowing customers to apply user-defined formulas at import to automatically transform and process data. Users also have much greater control to define font scaling rules when reports and dashboards are scaled and resized.

Altair's core competency in math-based simulation and optimization methodologies has enabled the deep integration of a simulation engine that allows business analysts to explore a broader solution space faster, to make the "best" decisions. Through advanced functionality, like block operations and embedded optimization formulations, analysts can generate and study numerous scenarios to identify a solution that satisfies business objectives and constraints.

Finally, HiQube 6.0 extends its open architecture with a new, comprehensive set of HTTP RESTful API's to easily drive and embed HiQube within third-party and proprietary applications.

To learn more about HiQube, 6.0 training schedules and upcoming webinars, and to download a free trial version, please visit www.hiqube.com.

About HiQube

HiQube is a high-performance, optimization-driven business intelligence and data analytics solution for guided decision-making. Developed and supported by Altair Engineering, HiQube leads an advanced generation of BI technology, serving as both an end-to-end BI solution and a complementary software stack extension to perform higher-level data analytics. HiQube empowers stakeholders across the enterprise to connect dynamically to multiple data stores and ad hoc data sets within a single unified environment. Complex business models can be easily created in HiQube's combined multi-dimensional, relational and hierarchical data engine to deliver unparalleled decision-making power.  To learn more, please visit www.hiqube.com.

About Altair

Altair Engineering, Inc. empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with more than 1,400 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 25-year track record for high-end software and consulting services for engineering, computing and enterprise analytics, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

SOURCE Altair Engineering, Inc.