Actuate Turns Unstructured Data into Business Intelligence
Actuate (NASDAQ: BIRT) unveiled a new offering this week that gleans business intelligence from unstructured and semi-structured data, which comprises the vast majority of data in organizations.
The structured data residing in databases has long been mined for business intelligence, but the new X2BIRT offering from Actuate — based on the company's acquisition of Xenos last year — turns high-volume transactional output, such as print streams and document archives, into interactive content, user configurable dashboards and in-memory data cubes for analysis in Actuate's BIRT business intelligence system.
X2BIRT lets ActuateOne customers combine information from both structured and non-structured data sources, such as statements, invoices and bills, archived content in enterprise content management systems and operational reports from mainframes.
Paul Walker, vice president and general manager of Actuate's Xenos Group, said X2BIRT uses untapped sources like printer language files to find new avenues for business intelligence, saving such important data from being forgotten in archives.
Nobby Akiha, Actuate's senior vice president of marketing, calls the new solution “very unique.”
“We think there's tremendous potential here,” he said.
By using print streams that produce printed and mailed statements, ActuateOne users can monitor and analyze information such as credit card and phone usage across time and departments for cost management. Banking and investing statements can also be analyzed, and archived and statement data can also be combined with data from other applications such as CRM, sales force automation, human resources and financial management systems.
X2BIRT supports a number of documents and data sources, along with content management systems from IBM and EMC and Java API. It is priced on a per CPU core basis.
For more on business intelligence, see Six Ways Business Intelligence Software Can Help Your Business
Paul Ferrill has been writing for over 15 years about computers and network technology. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering as well as a MS in Electrical Engineering. He is a regular contributor to the computer trade press. He has a specialization in complex data analysis and storage. He has written hundreds of articles and two books for various outlets over the years. His articles have appeared in Enterprise Apps Today and InfoWorld, Network World, PC Magazine, Forbes, and many other publications.
