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100% Information Adoption Drives Breakthrough Corporate Performance

Interview with Nobby Akiha, Actuate

With the dramatic expansion of information technology, and the desire for increased competitiveness in corporations, there has been an increase in the use of computing power to produce unified reports that join different views of the enterprise in one place. Termed Enterprise Reporting, this process involves querying data sources with different logical models to produce a human readable report. One example would be to query the Human Resources databases and the Capital Improvements databases to show how efficiently space is being used across an entire corporation. Enterprise Reporting is a fundamental part of the larger movement towards improved Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. Nobby Akiha, Vice President of Marketing at Actuate Corporation, spoke to Eclipse Magazine about Enterprise Reporting, and why it is fundamental for improved Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.

Eclipse Magazine (EM): Actuate was the first to provide the industry with a real-time Enterprise Reporting Application Platform with Actuate 8. Has Enterprise Reporting evolved in depth and strength over the years? Has it been a smooth transition?

Nobby Akiha (NA): Throughout the years, the one constant in Enterprise Reporting has been the requirement to empower large numbers of users with easy to use information, something we at Actuate refer to as 100% adoption of information.

However, there has been a constant evolution in the underlying technology to support Enterprise Reporting. The shift to Web-based technology in the 90’s drove target user populations higher, necessitating a significant increase in scalability. More recently, the increasingly competitive business environment has meant that real-time information delivered through reports has become important. As we look to the future, organizations are focusing on service-oriented architectures (SOAs). So delivering reporting and analytics as services that can be embedded in applications will be significant. For our customers, the transition through these technology changes has been relatively smooth as our architecture has always been the first to integrate with new paradigms.

EM: Actuate’s product and services portfolio also comprises Managed Spreadsheet Application Platform and Performance Management applications. Could you tell us a bit more about these offerings and what was the need to introduce them in the market at this time?

NA: The Managed Spreadsheet capabilities are unique to Actuate within the Business Intelligence space. These capabilities address and reconcile two fundamental realities within organizations. First, MS Excel is the most universally understood tool by users for reporting and analytics. Second, the variety of homegrown techniques for populating and distributing Excel files often leads to data inconsistencies that create maintenance issues. By automatically populating Excel spreadsheets with real-time data from multiple data sources, and securely managing the distribution of these workbooks from a central server, the Actuate platform allows users to enjoy the convenience of spreadsheets without the typical data inconsistency issues and headaches.

In January 2006, Actuate acquired Performancesoft, one of the leaders in the Performance Management area. It was a great match for both companies since we share the same vision of empowering and involving as many people as possible in the use of information to improve performance. Performance Management has become more important in the market due to the increasing competitive pressures faced by all organizations. Actuate’s Performance Management solution now provides visibility into the high-level performance metrics, and the detailed transactional information that rolls up into those metrics.

EM : Actuate has worked with the Eclipse Foundation on the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project. Recently, with the Callisto project, Eclipse BIRT 2.1 was released. Could you explain what are the upgrades and improvements in the new release? Why should developers and enterprises be excited about Eclipse BIRT 2.1?

NA: BIRT 2.1 makes it even easier for developers to quickly create the types of rich, graphical reports that users are expecting with their applications. Although there are numerous enhancements, perhaps the most significant area of improvement is charting, with support for new types of charts and increased flexibility in working with legends and axes. BIRT 2.1 also includes improvements in data access and manipulation, with support for connection pooling and joined data sets.

EM: Recent trends show emerging end-user activity in the Web 2.0 front. Custom-developed applications based on Service Oriented Architecture are also ‘hot’ at present. What is Actuate doing to capitalize on these trends?

NA: The interest in Web 2.0 is certainly extending beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise space. The trend towards composite applications based on Service Oriented frameworks is one key component of the Web 2.0 paradigm. Our platform’s extensive range of Web Services-based API’s ensures that customers can leverage Actuate-based services for reporting and analytics that easily integrate with their SOA infrastructure. Another hallmark of the Web 2.0 paradigm is the trend towards more interactive capabilities in the browser, typically supported by AJAX. With Actuate 9, we are providing AJAX-based interactivity that easily allows users to customize their views of information in reports.

EM: With the release of Actuate 9, the principles of open source will be applied to work inside an organization for Business Intelligence. How does Actuate 9 achieve this? What results can be expected from such a shift in development?

NA: Actuate 9 brings the important open source principles of participation, iterative development, and modularity to the business intelligence process. These principles that have contributed to the success of open source software development will lower the cost of developing and maintaining reports and analytics because everyone in an organization, whether they are from the IT organization or other business units, can share and build on each other’s work. We are enabling this through a unique framework that we refer to as the Collaborative Reporting Architecture.

EM: Could you tell us a bit about Collaborative Reporting Architecture? How does a common BIRT-based design format help users with varied skill sets?

NA: The Collaborative Reporting Architecture, which is unique to Actuate, speeds report development by supporting collaboration among users of every skill level. Typically, a wide range of users within an organization create reports. Some are highly technical IT people, while others may be slightly less technical users who are outside IT. With Actuate, each different type of user has access to a reporting environment that’s appropriate to their skill set. The important difference is that each of these environments shares the same BIRT-based report design format, so that the work done by one user can be leveraged by another. Without this capability, users would be wasting time by potentially re-creating reports or report elements that have already been created.

EM: Actuate has touted the bi-directional nature of its products and claims its competitors lack open source, design [sharing] and interactivity. Has Actuate reached the pinnacle of development with Actuate 9? What steps still lie ahead on the road to success?

NA: The Collaborative Reporting Architecture in Actuate 9 offers customers important capabilities they can’t get elsewhere, and our platform excels at meeting the requirements for 100% of our customers’ reporting applications. However, we feel there is constant room for improvement in the efficiency with which organizations can meet these requirements. For example, we expect Open Source developers and users to begin contributing report templates, modules and even pre-packaged SOA services, which can be reused throughout the community. These modules can, of course, be re-used within the Collaborative Reporting Architecture through design sharing. Just as the Collaborative Reporting Architecture brings new efficiencies to development, we will continue to push the limits in terms of efficiencies with deployment, including scalability and reuse management.

EM: What future do you see for Enterprise Reporting and Business Intelligence? Do you feel there will be rapid strides in its development in the next five years?

NA: While Enterprise Reporting and Business Intelligence have made important strides in the last few years, the use of Business Intelligence and Reporting still has room for growth within organizations. As our economies evolve, the use of information will become a more important competitive asset. The organizations that realize this are doing their best to accelerate the use of Business Intelligence in every business process. So I think that we’ll be seeing more analytics and reports that are integrated within the transactional processes supported by applications.

Nobby Akiha brings over 18 years of experience in high technology and consumer packaged goods marketing to Actuate Corporation. He joined Actuate in 2000 as vice president of Marketing. Prior to joining Actuate, he was vice president, Marketing and Business Development at Inference Corporation. Mr. Akiha also served as senior consultant at Regis McKenna, Inc., Director of Marketing Communications for CASE vendor Interactive Development Environments (IDE) and Group Product manager at Oracle Corporation. Mr. Akiha started his marketing career consulting to consumer packaged goods companies at Management Decision Systems and Burke Marketing Research. He holds a B. Commerce from the University of British Columbia and an M. Science in Management from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

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