Actuate Takes Enterprise Reporting to Next Level with Version 8Actuate Takes Enterprise Reporting to Next Level with Version 8

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

Actuate's new version 8 moves enterprise reporting to a new level of maturity. This major release directly addresses the end user accessibility and information and integration requirements that organizations face in directly implementing and deploying reports across the enterprise. Through the direct leverage of web and Microsoft Excel interfaces, Actuate has expanded the user aspects of leveraging information. With full integration of EII technology and the introduction of a new metadata management layer, Actuate brings enterprise reporting to a new level.

Assessment

Actuate, a tenured provider of enterprise reporting, has used its experience with customized reporting applications and broad deployments to enable organizations to directly address the user and information requirements in one server-based architecture. The demand to access data from a wide variety of heterogeneous sources like data warehouses, ERP and CRM systems has never been greater, but information architectures and best practices have been slow to respond. Organizations have either directly bolted reporting on to the individual source systems or created systems in which they cycle the data into data warehouses. This results in a limited silo-ed reporting architecture or a slow data cycle for users across the organization.

In the last couple of years, an evolutionary technology now called enterprise information integration (EII) has brought new on-demand access to data sources. Actuate’s acquisition of Nimble Technology in 2003 provided innovative EII technology, which is now integrated as part of the Actuate server technology. Ventana Research sees this as a critical advancement of server technology to support the wide range of integration options needed by global organizations.

The challenge that many organizations face in achieving consistent definition of information is the lack of common metadata between reporting and BI tools and sources of data. As mentioned, the demand for gaining access to data has made most data warehouses into a production system that is limited in its capability to be the master data reference for enterprise reporting. Actuate has introduced Information Objects as a new information management layer that simplifies the management of business and metric definitions in the enterprise.

The development and deployment of reports has also remained a challenge for organizations attempting to iterate reports to gain access to the right set of metrics. Once deployed, traditional reports have been limited in business users' ability to query additional information and integrate it into productivity tools like Microsoft Excel. Actuate has expanded its e.Spreadsheet interface to leverage the Information Object metadata that supports the EII technology, which expands business users' access to consistent information that could be dynamically queried from across the enterprise. Ventana Research has seen how companies can effectively leverage spreadsheets as part of an enterprise solution, which is something most organizations don’t do today.

Market Impact

The market for enterprise reporting continues to heat up as organizations look to standardize their approach to providing access and delivery of information to their enterprise and to outside constituents. Actuate, which has been in the business of providing enterprise reporting for over a decade, is continuing to raise the bar for what organizations should consider as part of an integrated server and solution. Many of the BI software providers like Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and others are playing catch up from a product perspective in integration, server technology, end user capabilities, report development, and maintenance capabilities. While Actuate has raised the bar for enterprise reporting, it must be more aggressive in order to compete against the larger BI providers.

Recommendation

Organizations that need new or expanded projects in enterprise reporting should consider Actuate. The full integration of end user accessibility, in controlled spreadsheet access and dynamic ad hoc access, to a report-based environment provides IT the comfort of meeting a wide variety of business users’ requirements. New metadata capabilities in Information Objects take full advantage of the EII technology and bring powerful capabilities in information and integration management together in one server environment. These advancements raise the bar for enterprise reporting and enhance the potential for performance improvement by fully leveraging information assets. This enterprise reporting approach from Actuate is quite unique and not found in other BI-based environments, which are still busy integrating their server and end user tools into a centralized environment.

Mark Smith is CEO & Senior Vice President of Research of Ventana Research.