TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE

Clarity is a corporate performance management solution that enables you to create standardized corporate reports and data entry templates based on existing company data. These templates and reports are then distributed to a user community for enterprise-wide financial processes, such as budgeting, planning, forecasting, and corporate reporting.

Clarity allows users to report and analyze company data using their Web browser over a corporate intranet or the Internet. It leverages the power of both OLAP (IBM DB2 OLAP, Hyperion Essbase, and MS Analysis Services) and relational (MS-SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2) databases.

This section contains information about Clarity and how it can be used to view, modify, and otherwise manipulate summary data to create a budgeting and planning solution for your organization. Also included in this section is a high-level architectural overview, and information about the mechanics of Clarity's software and server processes.

HOW CLARITY PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WORKS

Because Clarity is a Web based application, it has certain advantages over traditional software, which include ease of deployment and accessibility.

Web based applications do not require software to be installed on a PC in order to run them. To run Clarity, all you need is Internet Explorer and the URL of the Web server which hosts Clarity.

Clarity uses a series of server processes in order to coordinate communication from your Web browser to the database environment.

Clarity consists of the following server processes:

• The Clarity Server

• The OLAP database server

• The relational database server

Other important components in the Clarity solution include both administrator and end user client machines (used to communicate with Clarity), and any existing company ERP systems such as general ledgers and human resource systems (from which existing data is extracted).

The following pages illustrate a series of steps to show how data is transferred from your organization's existing ERP systems into the Clarity database environment, and how you can use Clarity to view and modify that data.