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May 29, 2002

The BI Majority Rules

Actuate 6 addresses the wide majority of business intelligence (BI) users, who need information delivered via a reporting system, not via an analytic platform.

By Philip Russom

Much of the BI community is in denial. There are numbers from various studies, but their meaning hasn't quite sunk in for all of us. Believe me, the "BI for the Masses" movement is real, and it's increasing the number of BI users in most large corporations. The increase is too dramatic to ignore and will continue for many years. Yet, many of us need to come out of denial and recognize an equally dramatic change, namely that the most common type of user has shifted. Report consumers (always the preponderant majority) now lead with an even wider majority, as compared to business analysts and other power users. Report consumers are the majority that has come to rule corporate BI implementations. Whether IT or vendor, you need to know the majority's requirements and satisfy them.

Actuate 6 from Actuate Corp. follows majority rule by providing a platform for delivering information to the report consumer. There's a lot that could be said about this new release, because it's the product of considerable rearchitecting. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I'll focus on two enhancements that directly impact implementations where the BI majority rules.

Assessment — Rules for Reporting to the Majority

On the server side of the BI stack, Actuate 6 is strongly rearchitected to enable information delivery to large user bases of report consumers. Like most BI vendors, Actuate has gracefully transitioned its products into Web environments, which are required for reaching huge user bases strewn across multiple enterprises. Once you make your reporting system accessible through the Internet, however, users automatically expect 24x7 availability and good response time when running or accessing reports. Actuate 6 enables scalability and high availability through new support for server clustering across heterogeneous operating systems with load balancing, failover, automatic recovery, and online maintenance.

On the client side of the BI stack, Actuate 6 gives users better support for their most beloved data manipulation tool, Microsoft Excel. This feature differs from most BI software vendors, who mistakenly believe that users will trade in Excel for an OLAP tool. Most users would actually rather use Excel to access enterprise data, add value to the data with Excel's familiar functions, then share their insights with colleagues in native Excel format. With most BI platforms, you can export data to Excel, but not bring Excel's formatting back for collaboration. Some of the more useful additions to Actuate 6 involve closing the value-add loop that enterprise Excel users want and need.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is a Research Director at Giga Information Group where he provides advice to user organizations about data warehousing, business intelligence, and database management.

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