Actuate Makes Open Source Business Intelligence Enterprise-Ready
Actuate (NASDAQ: ACTU) has added new features to its open source-based business intelligence software to make development and deployment of custom applications easier.
Actuate, which ranked high in a recent Forrester analysis of open source BI software, this week unveiled ActuateOne, or Actuate release 11, which the company says offers developers and end users “a single common architecture for development and deployment, utilizing one design, one server and a seamless unified end-user experience that meets the dynamically changing needs of information consumers.”
Based on the Eclipse BIRT open source project the company founded, including the latest version of BIRT iServer, ActuateOne “fulfills the vision that Actuate has had since the inception of BIRT to redefine the business intelligence category by moving away from a set of disparate tools to a suite of integrated capabilities within a single environment.”
Actuate adds interactive and analytic features to BIRT, such as data integration, dashboards, analytics, data visualization, advanced Excel features and new in-memory online analytical processing (OLAP) analytics capabilities.
Nobby Akiha, Actuate's senior vice president of marketing, said the open source BIRT software is good for “straightforward, small-scale” jobs that make up “the large majority of tasks” conducted by users.
Actuate is aimed at larger and more complex uses, but it also contains a number of user-friendly features such as “EasyScript,” an Excel-like scripting language designed to make BIRT easier to use.
Jay Lyman, enterprise software analyst with The 451 Group, said of the new release, “By integrating and simplifying how data from multiple sources is handled and unifying it for users, Actuate is able to transform the work of the open source Eclipse BIRT community into enhanced and extended functionality for BI and information applications, both open source and commercial.”
It's those enterprise features that inspired Forrester to give Actuate its top ranking for open source BI software vendors and projects.
ActuateOne pricing starts at $500 per CPU for a perpetual license.
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.
