1actuateActuate founded and co-leads the “Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools” (BIRT) open source project, which is used by over 2 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne platform.

According to the company, applications built on ActuateOne deliver more business and consumer insights to more people than all Business Intelligence (BI) companies altogether, ensuring businesses are ready for the exponential growth of “Big Data” and the proliferation of touch devices.

ActuateOne Suite

ActuateOne, a unified suite of products for rapidly developing and deploying BIRT-based custom BI applications and information applications, is the culmination of Actuate’s dedication to the Open Source BIRT Project.

As open source continues to gain momentum and acceptance, BIRT has pulled ahead of the pack, due to its ease of use and flexibility. As the backbone of many enterprise-level BI deployments, BIRT is an integral component of infrastructures everywhere, including many of the top-tier organisations in financial services, utilities, telecommunications and leading independent software vendors.

ActuateOne1

The ActuateOne suite provides organizations with a quick time to market and the ability to grow with success by including the following products:

  • ONE DESIGN: BIRT Designer Professional is a report development tool that is easy to use, supports extensive customization and is used to create reusable report components, interactive web reports and dashboards. It provides the tools IT and developers need to create templates and reports that can be accessed within the ActuateOne framework and used by both business and end users.
  • ONE PLATFORM: BIRT iServer delivers information to virtually unlimited numbers of users in record-breaking time. This scalable, world-class server generates, manages and securely delivers interactive, actionable business information to employees, customers and partners. It can integrate information from any data source and application, and can be phased in, adding features and resources as required.
  • ONE USER EXPERIENCE: The BIRT User Experience provides users with the appropriate tools required to create, view, analyze, access and interact with BIRT content in a seamless intuitive user interface. This single environment offers tools that meet any user’s needs, from internal business users to casual users outside the firewall. While these end users might have different ways in which they interact with BIRT content and data, they are really accessing different capabilities of the same output.

Applications built with ActuateOne provide users with one user experience regardless of task, tool or skill level; are supported by one server with a set of services to support any deployment and are built with one design using BIRT.

BIRT Analytics

One of the latest additions to ActuateOne is BIRT Analytics, a standalone analytics tool that considerably simplifies data analysis, providing analysts and business users advanced functionality to make better decisions in the age of Big Data.

BIRT Analytics helps to develop and improve the analytic culture across the organization by allowing business users to participate in the analytic process. What has been traditionally the exclusive domain of highly-skilled data scientists, can now be dealt with by using visual analytic techniques that match existing skill level against data from any source without requiring extended investments in decaying data warehouse strategies. BIRT Analytics insights feed KPIs, dashboards, reports, customer communications and mobile content, which can then be shared across the organization via the ActuateOne platform. Since resources, and especially data scientists and Hadoop experts are rare, BIRT Analytics can be of great helps for organizations to achieve their goals.

Case study: BIRT onDemand

Just recently, Actuate Corporation announced that they have integrated BIRT onDemand, Actuate’s SaaS version of ActuateOne, with Amazon Redshift which is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) new petabyte-scale cloud warehouse service.

The already incredibly fast visualization and analysis features of ActuateOne, combined with Amazon Redshift’s performance, enables organizations of all sizes to reap the benefits of ultra-fast access and near-speed-of-thought visualization for Cloud-based business analytics on real-time Big Data workloads - of any size or complexity, with scalability and at low cost (under US$1,000/terabyte/year).

"When integrated with Amazon Redshift, ActuateOne users are suddenly able to scale data at the same rate as ActuateOne scales users,” said Jeff Morris, VP of Product Marketing at Actuate. “Amazon Redshift can improve query performance and deliver data faster to ActuateOne, where it can be intuitively displayed and reconfigured in seconds through drag and drop interfaces to show patterns and anomalies and generate insights that lead to meaningful business improvements. Additionally, Amazon Redshift helps customers overcome one of the Big Issues in Big Data, which is where to put the data: “If not in Hadoop, then where?” With this integration, we enable data already in the cloud to remain there for ActuateOne visualization.”

Specific features and benefits of ActuateOne and BIRT onDemand using Amazon Redshift are:

  • Significantly enhanced scalability for visualization and analysis of data in ActuateOne: Amazon Redshift enables customers to scale easily from a single 2TB node up to one hundred 16TB nodes for 1.6PB of compressed user data - and ActuateOne makes this data easily available to customers for analysis and visualization. With ActuateOne and BIRT onDemand, customers can quickly and easily access all their Amazon Redshift data.
  • Unmatched data processing speed enables instant interactivity and “speed of thought” visualizations and insights within ActuateOne from extremely large data sets.
  • Elimination of up-front data warehousing costs: Amazon Redshift requires no upfront payments and enables customers to pay as they go. Amazon Redshift costs less than US$1,000 per TB per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions. By eliminating upfront expenses, enabling customers to get started with a 2TB data warehouse for less than a dollar an hour and allowing them to easily resize their clusters as needed, Amazon Redshift dramatically lowers the cost of data warehousing for customers.

Terry Wise, Head of Worldwide Ecosystem, AWS said: “With this integration, customers will benefit from Amazon Redshift’s performance, ease of use, scalability and low price, along with the rich analysis and visualization capabilities of Actuate’s solutions.” And indeed, ActuateOne running with Amazon Redshift enables organizations to visualize and analyze data of any volume or complexity from virtually any source including Twitter, Facebook, print archives and machine log data. It deploys in any environment, on premise and in private- or public clouds, and supports web-based and mobile BI on the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as on Android phones and tablets.

Certainly, the ActuateOne platform empowers developers to rapidly create custom, BIRT-based business analytics and customer communications applications, with analytic self-service for data-savvy users of BIRT Analytics.

Most impressive is the fact that any data, including unstructured sources, can be accessed and integrated, enabling developers, IT departments and OEMs to deliver world-class BI applications through cloud, hybrid, on-premise, web or touch device deployment.

So, if you are looking to strengthen your data visualization and analysis capabilities for better profitability – take a look at Actuate – The BIRT Company!

By Daniela La Marca