Actuate Announces Application For Analytic ProsActuate Announces Application For Analytic Pros

Actuate, which provides business intelligence applications for users of nearly every sophistication level, announced Monday the latest member to its software family.

The company said it designed its new Actuate Analytics for "power types" - the 7 percent of users who require multi-dimensional views, ad hoc reporting, and the ability to group data into cubes for greater in-depth analysis.

Unlike most BI vendors, Actuate has systematically worked its way up from the bottom of the complexity pyramid with its browser-based software. The marks the first application from Actuate focused on the most-sophisticated user.

"We are completing our user coverage by adding the last 7 percent of power users to our platform," said Vijay Ramakrishnan, director of strategic communications for the South San Francisco, Calif., company. "We think we've achieved the holy grail, which is meeting the needs of all users in an organization with a single server platform." Actuate's analytical software runs on the same iServer software platform as its other applications.

Actuate Analytics delivers what the company calls "dynamic spreadsheets." Here, the application feeds data directly, complete with data formatting and built-in calculations, into Excel spreadsheets. Other features include the ability to create and view personalized data cubes. That ability enables power users to analyze appliances sold by store, for example, or by salesperson. Users also can save data cubes to their laptops, then continue to analyze that information while disconnected from the server.

Actuate Analytics will have limited availability on December 31, and is slated to ship widely at the end of January. Pricing starts at $15,000 per CPU. Ramakrishnan said one CPU should support about 1,000 users, depending on how many access the software currently.