Actuate has refreshed its Multi-Application Option
(MAO) software, which allows companies to manage disparate business
intelligence applications and includes the ability to monitor the use of a
single application.
The South San Francisco-based vendor, which moved to acquire
Nimble Technology to bolster its reporting software capabilities, said the
software option will be available with release of the Actuate 7 platform by
year’s end.
Actuate competes with Business Objects, which acquired
Crystal Decisions, Cognos and Hyperion,
which purchased Brio.
Research firms such as IDC believe the market for applications that help
businesses intuit more about their customers’ sales patterns will amount to
a multi-billion dollar market in a few years. Companies such as Actuate are
looking to capitalize on that.
Actuate’s MAO lowers the costs of business intelligence software for
companies because it allows multiple applications to share the same hardware
without subtracting from the security and management of other applications.
Organizations can manage user management, backup, archiving, and security
administration for several applications.
MAO allows administrators to assign a set of processing resources to
specific applications and provides usage logging so administrators can
monitor how much applications are used. Usage logging also provides a tool
to implement charge-back policies.
The company also unveiled the Actuate e.Services Business Intelligence
Center of Excellence (CoE) Service, which helps businesses set up business
intelligence platforms to cut costs and better comply with reporting
regulations. By creating a CoE, companies can add more business intelligence
applications while controlling the cost of technology deployments through
the re-use of technology, processes and hardware across multiple
applications.
Actuate e.Services helps coordinate infrastructure planning, operations,
business facing IT, application development and executive sponsors to plan,
strategize and implement a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence.
Options for the CoE service include the configuration of server resources
and operations procedures to support a shared services environment, among
other things.
“Success with business intelligence requires a coordinated effort across the
dimensions of people, process, technology, and data,” said Allen Bonde,
president of Allen Bonde Group. “A BI Center of Excellence offers the
means to coordinate that effort by creating a common set of resources,
models and tools to meet the needs of the broadest set of business needs
while taking advantage of existing organization expertise, standards and
infrastructure.”
Companies under pressure to meet the reporting requirements within new
regulations such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act are using business intelligence
software to gain organizational insight and accountability at multiple
levels, said Vijay Ramakrishnan, Senior Director of Strategic Communications
for Actuate. Ramakrishnan illustrated how two customers, Pitt Ohio Express
and KeyCorp, are using BI to help inform themselves about the quality of
their business processes on a conference call.
Actuate Boosts Business Intelligence Software
