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ActuateOne – aiming for the “suite” spot
Monday, October 11, 2010 by Helena Schwenk
Last month Actuate unleashed a slew of products announcements that are wrapped up an umbrella brand ActuateOne – a unified product suite for developing and deploying reporting, analytic and dashboard applications. The suite leverages the open source Eclipse project, BIRT, and utilises the core capabilities of Actuate 11, the company’s commercial BI offering for large scale and higher performance user deployments. The release is part of Actuate’s strategy to galvanise company growth and demonstrate leadership in what it calls Rich Information Applications, offerings that deliver a high level of interactive and dynamic content as a way of increasing user adoption and ease-of-use.
In-memory, dashboard and cloud deployment capabilities increase reach of ActuateOne
There are two new tools included in the ActuateOne product suite: BIRT Data Analyzer and BIRT 360.
Data Analyzer is a multi dimensional analysis tool that utilises 64-bit in-memory capabilities enabling end users to interactively explore data within dashboards and Excel with limited help from IT. This initiative follows the trend by vendors to include in-memory processing options into their portfolios that load and query data in memory (which is much faster) – rather than having to process it on disk.
To validate its position as a leading Rich Information Application provider Actuate has also released BIRT 360, a web based authoring tool for building operational and analytical dashboards. The tool includes capabilities for leveraging rich Internet technologies such as AJAX for interactive report viewing and an Adobe Flash charting library. In addition the tool supports monitoring of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and enables developers to comppose dashboards using BIRT gadgets and third-party Google Gadgets (such as Google Maps). These are all features designed to raise the appeal for end users looking for a more intuitive and dynamic analysis experience – especially in applications that require a high degree of self-service and interactivity such as customer-facing applications.
In fact BIRT 360 and BIRT Data Analyzer represent just two of a range of output formats supported within ActuateOne. Others include BIRT spreadsheets, email and mobile devices where ActuateOne content is accessible via mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry.
Finally, ActuateOne now includes capabilities for elastic clustering of iServer (its scalable server for BI deployments) which allows administrators to dynamically adjust the configuration of iServer in response to varying capacity and application requirements. This move is designed to offer a more flexible and arguably lower cost deployment option for ActuateOne customers as well as following a general trend in the BI market whereby commercial open-source vendors such as Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Talend have started similar initiatives.
Developer productivity remains a key tenet but the data integration effort should not be overlooked
ActuateOne has been designed with a heavy emphasis on developer and end user productivity. Actuate believes the architecture of BIRT will help promote faster development of applications through its support – amongst other things – for reusing object-oriented components and libraries and by leveraging the BIRT Open Data Access framework for connecting to multiple data sources including print streams and documents (courtesy of its Xenos acquisition).
While there is merit in offering a more unified developer experience as demonstrated within ActuateOne, this should not be seen as the definitive answer to fast-tracking analytic application development. This approach for instance does not eradicate the significant effort (and cost) involved with making the data consumed within analytic applications ‘fit for purpose’. ActuateOne does provide a more cohesive developer environment, but any developer gains should be set in context of the overall data integration effort.
ActuateOne is ready to ship and will be generally available in October 2010. For a more detailed analysis and overview of the ActuateOne release, see our new Vendor Insight report.
Posted in Analytics, Information Management