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Actuate 9 Transforms Business Intelligence with the First Collaborative Reporting Architecture

 

JavaScriptSearch
Monday, June 26, 2006; 02:58 AM

Actuate Corporation introduced Actuate 9, an Enterprise Reporting Application platform based on the world’s first Collaborative Reporting Architecture. For the first time, organisations can apply both the technology and principles of open source to Business Intelligence processes. With Actuate’s Collaborative Reporting Architecture, companies can shift from a ‘closed BI model’ where information access and analysis is siloed, to an ‘open BI model’ that speeds report development by supporting collaboration amongst people of every skill level.


Until now, organisations have spent extraordinary amounts of time and energy negotiating reporting and analytic requirements among IT developers, business analysts and end users. As this process collapses, users retreat into silos, resulting in multiple versions of the truth, severe compliance risk and low adoption of information.

Actuate 9 can transform this broken process by applying Open Source principles, including participation, iterative development and modularity, for the benefit of an organisation’s Business Intelligence initiatives. Actuate’s Collaborative Reporting Architecture allows IT developers to quickly create a report and offer it immediately to business analysts and end users, who can now use new interactive capabilities to refine and polish the report in order to clarify their needs with IT. Design changes can be passed between these constituencies to grow the reporting application effectively because it continuously meets the changing needs of every user.

“The Actuate 9 Collaborative Reporting Architecture leverages a common, open design format across a set of skill-specific environments to facilitate interaction between information producers and consumers, resulting in efficient, iterative Business Intelligence processes,” said Pete Cittadini, president and CEO of Actuate Corporation. “Actuate 9 fundamentally breaks the economics of enterprise reporting by driving report creation and production costs down dramatically, while fostering community-based BI collaboration that expedites the decision making power of every employee, customer and partner.”

Collaborative Reporting Architecture

The Actuate 9 Collaborative Reporting Architecture combines open source technologies from the Eclipse Foundation BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project with the scalability, performance, reliability and security of the Actuate iServer and the interactivity of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to create the next generation Business Intelligence environment. The results are dynamic, interactive enterprise reports for every type of deployment and the first ad-hoc web reporting product that allows end–users and IT departments to collaborate on report definitions and effortlessly evolve report designs The Collaborative Reporting Architecture drives enterprise reporting costs down by leveraging the versatility of the Java development community, the speed and flexibility of Actuate’s Information Object metadata layer, and a revolutionary reusable design structure that encourages collaboration among users of every skill level, for every reporting project.

Actuate 9

Actuate 9 includes four new products based on the Collaborative Reporting Architecture. Actuate BIRT is now available as an option to the Actuate iServer and offers the ability to deliver interactive web reports based on the open source BIRT technology. Actuate BusinessReports is a new ad-hoc web report development product. Interactive Viewing is a new report viewing capability that allows end users to personalise, save and share their own perspectives of reports delivered from both Actuate BIRT and BusinessReports. Finally, iPortal is a new standards-based portal environment for accessing report content, launching BusinessReports and reviewing Actuate BIRT reports.

For an end user, using iPortal, reviewing BIRT reports in the Interactive Viewer or assembling BusinessReports requires no training. For IT departments, these new products in Actuate 9 offer new deployment flexibility and take advantage of popular skills and technologies already in place, specifically Java and Eclipse-based products. With Actuate 9, IT can leverage a common technology to embed reporting in Java applications or to deploy reporting applications for workgroups or across the extended enterprise.

Actuate 9 is comprised of the following skills-specific report design and viewing products:

• Actuate BIRT Option and Actuate BIRT Designer — enable professional application developers and report developers to build dynamic, interactive enterprise reports ready for deployment to end users and create composite report design templates for BusinessReports. Because Actuate BIRT is based on open source code, developers will be able to leverage templates and resources created by the BIRT ecosystem to speed report development and deployment.

• Actuate BusinessReports — enables business analysts and power users to craft ad-hoc web reports by using re-useable BIRT-based foundation reports and including data from Information Objects. The iterative design and development approach empowers close collaboration between developers and end users, who can quickly create and rapidly evolve reports to meet the changing needs of information consumers.

• Interactive Viewing — AJAX-powered interactivity that enables every type of user to think beyond the current structure of the report and personalise it into his or her own perspective. Users have the flexibility to modify report views, reducing the number of reports that need to be created. This flexibility rewards end-user initiative with fast results and the insight to drive corporate performance.

• iPortal —iPortal hosts Actuate BIRT, BusinessReports and Interactive Viewing, and can be deployed alone on a single server for small workgroups or in conjunction with the Actuate iServer when enterprise caliber capabilities are required, including scale, access to Information Objects and multi-project support. JSR-168 portlets are also available to deploy content in standards-based portal environments.

• Actuate 9 iServer — Enterprise Reporting Application platform with high scale, performance, reliability and security.

• Actuate 9 Information Objects — enables data architects to leverage Actuate’s Enterprise Information Integration (EII) - powered metadata to supply reusable data objects across the product line.


The Actuate BIRT Option, Actuate BIRT Designer, Actuate BusinessReports, Interactive Viewing, and iPortal will be available in Q3 2006. Actuate 9 will run alongside Actuate 8 environments without requiring migration.


www.actuate.com

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