User-friendly BI takes shape

Actuate and MicroStrategy continue to battle over an enterprise market increasingly demanding more user-friendly business intelligence from a single BI platform.

Actuate this week will unveil Actuate 8 that integrates EII (Enterprise Information Integration) technology into enterprise reporting. The move is designed to extend the data warehouse by providing on-demand access to varied data sources. For its part, MicroStrategy will roll out a Unix-based version of its 7i BI platform this week. 

Key to the new version of Actuate’s enterprise reporting application platform is a unified metadata layer designed to allow enterprises to leverage a variety of disparate sources such as ERP and CRM applications, data warehouses, legacy systems, and other XML-based data sources to compile reports.

Although BI heavyweights such as Cognos and Business Objects have been maneuvering to supplement their analytic reporting tools best suited for power users with enterprise reporting, Actuate 8 is one of the few vendors to offer a unified metadata layer for analytic, enterprise, and business reporting, said Keith Gile, a senior BI analyst at Forrester Research.

MicroStrategy recently entered into the world of reporting with a new tool called Reporting Services, released late last year, Gile said. “This is somewhat the holy grail for a reporting platform … by having a single, common metadata layer for all reporting solutions, you would reduce the administrative overhead and you would eliminate inconsistencies from different reporting mechanisms,” he added.

With Actuate’s new EII component, enterprises can boost the benefits of operational applications by compiling reports that pull data directly from those systems without having to go through the data warehouse, Gile said.

Actuate has helped Lincoln Financial Distributors, based in Philadelphia, Pa., to provide consistent sales data for its managers, external sales force, and partners, said Miko Pickett, Lincoln assistant vice president. Actuate 8 will provide more timely and streamlined sales reporting while eliminating current performance bottlenecks and the need to lock the company’s 50 to 70 users out of the warehouse for two or more hours per day, she added.

For its part, MicroStrategy continues its quest to bring reporting and analysis to the masses with the introduction of its new Unix-based platform called MicroStrategy 7i Universal Edition that runs in 32-bit and 64-bit modes.

IDC estimates that approximately 22 percent of the BI market is based on Unix, said Research Director Dan Vesset. In addition to opening up a new market for MicroStrategy, the performance of its reporting and analysis will be enhanced because 7i now runs in full 64-bit mode, he added.