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Dashboard Spy Reader Compares Enterprise Reporting Products »

Actuate I-Server Enterprise Reporting Dashboards

Dashboard Reporting Topic: Actuate Dashboards and Dashboard Reports

In the last couple of posts on The Dashboard Spy, we’ve been examining random enterprise dashboard screenshots of reporting portals and enterprise dashboards. For a look at the highlights and detailed results please check the post on the enterprise dashboard vendor ratings. Moving on to another vendor covered by Meta Group in their rating of vendors for Enterprise Reporting and Enterprise Dashboards, we look at Actuate.

Actuate and Business Objects tied for second place with a rating of 5.4 which was just a bit behind the leading vendor, Information Builders with their WebFOCUS dashboard product at 5.6. Info Builders and Actuate, by the way, led with the largest number of enterprise reporting deployments in the field.

As the Meta Group rating stated:

Actuate I-Server 8.0 and e.Spreadsheet

Actuate I-Server 8 and e.Spreadsheet server are a powerful combination for addressing enterprise reporting
and dashboard requirements. A mature product, Actuate has numerous customers with deployments of more
than 50,000 users. Actuate is only one of two vendors to score above average or best in class in all evaluation categories. Actuate finishes tied for second in the overall vendor, ranking within one-fifth of a point of the leader.

Strengths

• Strong Excel integration support meeting all five criteria; upcoming matrix capabilities will add a third
dimension to data in an Excel environment
• Best in class in distribution, scalability and performance, parameter processing, and usability
• Above-average scores in presence, connectivity, development, administration, and pricing
• Strong EII capabilities for real-time reporting needs

Limitations

• Real data not represented in WYSIWYG report formatting interface
• No check in/check out or versioning support for multiple developers
• Difficult to get concessions in pricing; tendency to sell add-on products (e.g. e.Spreadsheet) instead of
bundling in the suite

Here are some enterprise dashboards done using the I-Server product. A random selection is shown.

Actuate report list page

Actuate dashboard

Actuate reporting

List of reports available on portal

Actuate Enterprise Dashboard

Dashboard Portlet

Actuate Dashboard Portlet

Enterprise dashboard dials

Dashboard KPI

By the way, since the Meta Group study was done, Actuate purchased into the performance dashboard space. From an article on this:

Actuate Buys Into Performance Management
1/18/2006

By Stephen Swoyer

The business intelligence (BI) marketscape is changing. Drastically. Best of breed is on the way out, even as all-in-one-ed-ness is coming on strong. Over time, most organizations will replace non-integrated best-of-breed tools with highly integrated good-enough offerings. It’s unclear just what this will mean for BI pure-plays who’ve staked their market aspirations on one or two best of breed offerings. But it can’t be an encouraging trend.

BI reporting specialist Actuate Corp., for its part, doesn’t appear to be taking any chances: Actuate has significantly expanded its financial performance management (FPM) practice over the last 12 months, shipping two iterations of its Actuate FPM product (now in version 2.0) and aggressively courting financial services firms. (Actuate claims that more than half of new sales go to financial services firms with $1 billion or more in annual revenues).

Last week, Actuate made another performance management-related move, nabbing Toronto-based performancesoft Inc., a provider of corporate performance management (CPM) products and services, in an all-cash transaction valued at $16.5 million (US). Analysts say the performancesoft acquisition could be a boon to Actuate in a couple of ways: it fleshes out the company’s performance management stack, for one thing (CPM has become a de rigueur component of most of the platform BI suites); and it also gives Actuate cross-selling opportunities into performancesoft’s customer base.

Oh, yeah… one other thing: performancesoft also gives Actuate an analytic dashboard. And if you’re drinking Actuate’s brand of Kool-Aid, dashboards are the thing. “Dashboards and scorecards are the preferred applications to deliver executive-level information to manage corporate performance,” said Actuate president and CEO Pete Cittadini, in a statement. “Our customers will now be able to quickly build and deploy rich, intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard and scorecard applications, offering managers at all levels the ability to drill through from executive-level information to real-time operational details.”

performancesoft’s bread-and-butter product—pbViews—is a dashboard-based offering powered by an OLAP engine. It supports drill-down to real-time operational data. More importantly, however, it’s pitched as a tool for both the analytically savvy (business analysts) and the not-so-analytically savvy (business executives). Add it all up, says Robert Lerner, a senior analyst for data management with consultancy Current Analysis, and it looks like a sound move.

“Overall, the acquisition should be a good one for Actuate. The company needed to strengthen its corporate performance management capabilities, and performancesoft’s technology will enable Actuate to reap some immediate benefit, since the company’s pbViews can essentially be snapped into Actuate’s platform to give customers dashboard capabilities,” Lerner writes. What’s more, he argues, performancesoft and pbViews should help to retrofit Actuate’s spreadsheet-centric reporting line for CPM.

Be sure to do plenty of research on this and any other enterprise dashboard platform.

Tags: Meta Group rating of vendors for enterprise reportijng and enterprise dashboards, enteprise dashboard vendor comparison

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Last Modified: Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 @ 10:37

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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