Elixir Technology

25. April 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I was introduced to Elixir by Brooks Rembert from JNetDirect recently and wanted to share my impressions of the company and their primary offering, Elixir Repertoire 7.  Elixir is a 10 year old privately held company based in the Republic of Singapore.  They claim over 600 customers world-wide, most in the Singapore and the Far East.  They have a very robust partnership program in place, with Channel and OEM partners that resell their product, and service partners that assist clients with implementations.  JNetDirect is the exclusive distribution partner in the United States. 

Their flagship product, Repertoire 7, is a Java based reporting and dashboard tool that has a data integration capability as well.  I was recently given a demo of their product by the CEO, Shih Hor-Lau.  He walked me through the reporting capability, which includes support for writing and distributing standard reports along with an OLAP capability to support power users.  They also have a very flexible dashboard capability, with a number of widgets and gadgets available out of the box.  The product was developed from the ground up with Java, but includes a set of APIs (“REST APIs”) which support integration with Java, .NET, Perl, AJAX, Ruby, Flex.  The data integration component, “Data ETL”, is actually an Enterprise Information Integration (EII) tool that allows source systems to be mapped, and data to be extracted and integrated at report run-time.  They do not currently have an underlying meta-data repository, but Hor-Lau said they are planning to add that in a future release.

Elixir has a small professional services organization that is capable of handling installation and configuration of the product.  They rely on their service partners or the client to handle the end-to-end implementation activities.

JNetDirect is currently handling Level 1 support in the US, and is ramping up to provide Level 2 support in the near future.  All Level 3 support will be handled by Elixir out of their Singapore offices.

In summary, Repertoire seems to be a viable alternative for someone looking for a low-cost integrated reporting and dashboard development tool.  The data integration component provides the ability to map into a variety of data source types, but is not a heavy duty ETL tool and should not be used to handle large data volumes, complex transformations, or data cleansing.  The lack of a meta data repository is a concern, as it limits visibility to what is available in the Elixir tool, and prevents you from integrating other tools such as a third-party ETL or meta-data management (MDM) product.

Reference:

-        Interview with CEO on SYS-CON TV at Java1 2006

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