EasyAsk for ISVs

EasyAsk® for ISVs is the only embedded natural-language search, query and reporting technology on the market for today’s forward-thinking developers looking to build additional value into their applications. Its powerful functionality extends the availability of an application to include power users and non-technical business users alike, allowing all users to quickly find, retrieve and leverage information trapped within multiple underlying enterprise data sources.

Linguistic technology from EasyAsk extends beyond simple, ineffective keyword searching with its advanced linguistic, semantic natural language query. This enables universal access across the user base and eliminates the complexity of querying multiple structured and unstructured data sources. It instantly delivers accurate answers to virtually any business inquiry, eliminates standard reporting constraints and drastically reduces the support burden on IT for delivering and maintaining an inventory of ever-changing reports.

Unlock the Value of Your Application Data with Embedded Natural-language Query

Built on a secure, J2EE-based open-standards architecture, EasyAsk’s sophisticated industry-specific dictionaries enable users to converse with business application data using the one query language they are the most comfortable with—their own natural language. These dictionaries can be taught and continuously refined with the everyday language of business users. Using their terms, phrases or short-cuts, the embedded EasyAsk technology dynamically generates ABL (Progress 4GL) or SQL queries from everyday language questions to blend business intelligence, search and dynamic navigation into a package that extends the value of business applications.

Through a thin-client software application, EasyAsk combines the seamless integration of application data structures with advanced linguistic-processing techniques, leveraging the underlying meaning of words to deliver precise, relevant results to business questions. For example, questions like “Who are the top 5 sales reps this quarter?” or “Show customers with no orders of ‘x’ product in the last 6 months.” And, EasyAsk provides a development kit and all the programming interfaces necessary to quickly integrate the technology with any application.

Progress EasyAsk understands both the question being asked and the contextual relevance of the content being used to answer the question through brokering and federated technologies. This takes the complexity out of extracting answers and intelligence trapped within business applications.

Progress EasyAsk Reports: Custom Reporting in Real-time

In most organizations, ongoing support for real-time reporting is difficult to achieve due to other priorities and constraints placed on IT.  And, standard reports provide little more than a snapshot of data, often doing only one thing—generating more questions!

Progress EasyAsk embeds open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) into its query engine, enabling ISVs to deliver real-time operational and analytical reports presented in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF and several fixed tables, charts and spreadsheets that can be easily customized and distributed by business users.