Board International S.A. is a

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

(BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM)

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

vendor known for its Board toolkit. The company was based in Chiasso, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1994, and

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

, Massachusetts. Board International now operates in 19 countries, with around 3,000 customers from a variety of industries.

Products

The firm offers one product, the Board toolkit. It combines various

(BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) functions within a single graphical software environment. The BI capabilities include multi-dimensional analysis, ''ad hoc'' querying, dashboarding and reporting, while the CPM capabilities include budgeting, planning and forecasting as well as "other finance-related activities." It does not require any programming skills to build applications.

Technology

As of version 7, the toolkit featured a service-oriented architecture that relied heavily on

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

technology, especially the .NET Framework with its Windows Communication Foundation. This allowed for a tight integration with other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office, but required

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

in order to run the full client, a limitation which has been identified by

Gartner Gartner, Inc. is an American research and advisory firm focusing on business and technology topics. Gartner provides its products and services through research reports, conferences, and consulting. Its clients include large corporations, gover ...

as a possible factor for preventing a deeper market penetration. In 2012, the company introduced an update of its proprietary

multidimensional database In computing, online analytical processing (OLAP) (), is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. The term ''OLAP'' was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction proces ...

. This new technology was labelled as ''HBMP (Hybrid Bitwise Memory Pattern)''. It introduced a new compression method and combines disk-based and in-memory database approaches. It supports both relational and multidimensional data models.

Offices

The firm has a total of twenty-seven offices spread across five continents and nineteen countries, with headquarters in Chiasso, Switzerland, and Boston, USA. The company opened three new offices in 2011 (China, Japan and Mexico). Board has fourteen offices in Europe, three offices in Australia, five in Asia, four in North America, and one in South America.

References

{{Reflist

External links

BOARD International Website
Business intelligence companies Software companies of Switzerland Swiss companies established in 1994