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.