BI Apps for the Apple iPad

After my last blog on Apple iPad apps such as USA Today, UrbonSpoon, and ABC Player, readers still wanted to know, “what about BI applications?”

If your organization wants to use the iPad for internal Business Intelligence applications, then you have three main choices available:

• Build and deploy your own enterprise BI applications
• Build a web BI application and access it with the Safari browser on the iPad
• Use a pre-built BI application obtained from the Apple App Store

Let’s consider for now just the third option.  Who offers packaged BI applications straight from the App Store?

At the top of the list is QlikView for iPad HD from QlikTech, a major European BI firm that is gaining ground in the United States.  To use the BI iPad application, you need to have a QlikView Server supplying data to the handhold.  To see the app in action, QlikView provides a demo server.

QlikView offers output in simple grid data views and nice graphs.  There is basic selection capabilities that lets you pick parameters such as dates and dimensions.  With the 3G iPad, QlikView …
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