A Tale of Two Technologies: Business Intelligence vs.

Rich Internet Applications

When selecting reporting technologies, it is important to understand the applications and the users they were designed to serve. The assumptions and technical decisions made by vendors shape the capabilities, performance, reliability and scalability of their products and clearly reveal that reporting technologies are not all created equal. adoption of these technologies across the enterprise. Actuate provides skill-specific, object-oriented development environments operating over a robust and scalable common infrastructure. This supports a wide range of information producersfrom novices to expertsto create highly interactive, instantly usable, Web-based reports, reporting applications and live Excel spreadsheets.

Target Applications
Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools are designed to help self-sufficient power users to access, massage and present information to management. In contrast, as an Enterprise Reporting platform for Rich Internet Applications, Actuate is designed to: Provide the integrated development platform required to create Rich Internet Applications. complete with a programming environment, object-oriented reuse, advanced scalability and multi-project support Deliver applications that provide users with information in a self-service, zero-training environment that encourages adoption of both information and technology by 100% of employees, customers and partners. Provide regular and on-demand content to all users from a single unified platform and server so they can make the right decisions at the right time Streamline financial, operational and customer interaction processes with up-to-the-moment information to slash costs and improve customer satisfaction Match collaborative, spreadsheet or brochure-quality reporting styles to user skills, roles and objectives to provide the richest , most personalized user experience possible

Content in Context
Highly adoptable Rich Internet Applications provide consumers interactive, personalized content. These applications support Web 2.0 technologies such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex and AJAX in multiple output formats such as print, PDF, Microsoft Office and interactive Web dashboards. Current BI technologies support multiple users and output formats but lack an RIA-ready development platform background. Such technologies suffer from the lack of flexibility and creativity required to create RIAs because they lack a programming environment, reusable components, scalability and multiproject support. In contrast, RIA-ready platforms built purely on Web 2.0 technologies lack a common platform and infrastructure. Such applications offer limited reusability, report layouts, ad-hoc report development and interactive viewing capabilities. This lack of BI background and technology creates applications that are inflexible; they do not respond quickly to change requirements and technology Actuate delivers a reusable framework built on an open source, common, unified application platform with an infrastructure that allows customers to build applications that are highly interactive.

Information Consumers and Producers

Todays BI technologies were built to serve the needs of power users who comprise less than 5% of the enterprise and address the needs of external audiences poorly or not at all. Instead of supporting hundreds of users, Actuate built applications can serve up to hundreds of thousands of users - employees, customers and partners. User roles vary across an organization and are commonly dictated by area of responsibility, job function, or their placement in the management hierarchy. The first step in establishing a successful BI strategy is to recognize the need to facilitate the participation of every user, acknowledging that their role and their analytic skills influence the types of reporting applications they receive. BI tools are designed for power users to write reports after completing significant training, which limits the widespread

Dependable, Robust Performance

As organizations expand their use of mission-critical reporting applications for large user populations, dependability and high performance become crucial business requirements. While BI tools can provide respectable response rates for their small audiences, Actuate iServer delivers high performance to any size community of employees, customers and partners using enterprise reporting applications. This requirement is particularly crucial in external applications such as information and customer service portals for which users have extremely high performance expectations.

High Availability
Since information applications serve all users in an enterprise with mission-critical information, the platform should be architected so that it is dependable, easy to manage, has 24x7availability and no single point of failure.

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Traditional BI technologies are designed for nine-to-five research and analysis functions and therefore lack the industrial-strength architecture that delivers high availability. In stark contrast, Actuate iServer offers loadbalanced, J2EE server clusters with no single point of failure, and failover safeguards to ensure user requests are always routed to an available server with the lightest computing load.

Collaborative Reporting Architecture

The Actuate Collaborative Reporting Architecture blends the open technologies from the BIRT project with the scalability, performance and reliability of the iServer and the interactivity of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) into a BI environment never before available. The result is dynamic, interactive enterprise reports for any type of deployment and an ad-hoc web reporting environment that allows end users and IT to collaborate and iterate on report definitions, effortlessly evolve report designs, and dynamically craft interactive Web reports. This effectively brings both open source technology and principles such as participation, iterative development and modularity to work inside the enterprise to drive information adoption and corporate performance. No other vendor offers collaborative reporting of both report content and report designs across interactive customization environments that are matched to user skills. Only Actuate provides RIAs that facilitate this collaboration, with products ranging from Interactive Viewing to Business ReportStudio to BIRT report development

Predictable, Linear Scalability

A cost-effective solution enables organizations to add server hardware and enjoy a proportional increase in the size of the user community they can serve while maintaining acceptable performance. While Actuates clustered-server J2EE architecture supports near-linear scalability for enterprise-wide application deployment, traditional BI technologies support only small user audiences and lose regularly in scalability benchmarks. Actuate deployments can scale at the presentation (iPortal), generation (iServer) and storage (iServerExpress) areas, independently, based on system performance requirements. Actuate is the only vendor to provide comprehensive disclosure of all benchmarking processes, results and conclusions.

Comprehensive Data Access

An information application solution must be able to access a variety of real-time data sources including relational databases, enterprise applications, flat files and legacy systems. Traditional BI technologies are built around data warehouse projects, which add ever-evolving scope, ETL complexities and storage of non-real-time data. Actuate accesses and updates a wide variety of real-time enterprise data sources via its Information Objects metadata and EII technology.

Actuate 9 Open Source BI

Actuate 9 provides brochure quality reporting, interactive web reporting, spreadsheet reporting and an integrated performance management suite, built over an open, robust rich internet application infrastructure. STRENGTHS Skill specific report authoring environments for brochure quality, spreadsheet and collaborative reporting over a common unified platform and architecture Web 2.0 ready development platform with programmablity, reusable components, advanced scalability and multi-project support Open source BIRT based technology that integrates into the existing product line Expanding developer base and community support from the Eclipse foundation and BIRT community website Only vendor in the market with the ability to generate highly scalable server generated spreadsheets with SmartSheet security Excellent solution for large, high scalable, secure reporting applications Integrated performance management and dashboarding suite WEAKNESSES Limited datawarehousing and ETL capabilities No data mining No predictive analysis Limited OLAP capabilities Minimal search within encyclopedia, repository

Language and Localization

As Web deployment extends the audience for information applications across international boundaries, support for local languages, currencies and syntax becomes crucial. Actuates built-in Unicode and localization support allows organizations to develop a report once for any number of languages and countries.

Flexible, Open Source Alternative

Open-source strategies have become an important part of the development strategies of many large organizations. The Eclipse Foundation leads the way with 65% of organizations claiming use or awareness of Eclipse as an open-source solution, more than three times any other alternative. Actuate remains the only reporting software vendor with an open-source strategy, with its BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) software, which includes tools for developing Web reports. Actuate also offers BIRT-based commercial products for Web, adhoc and collaborative reporting.

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Business Objects XI
Release 3 of Business Objects XI includes reporting, query, and analysis, on demand BI, performance management and data integration STRENGTHS Complete set of functionality spread across product suite Data Integrator and metadata access multiple sources Excellent vendor recognition and good market share Excellent integration with Microsoft Office products Large Crystal installed base Good scalability WEAKNESSES Business Objects' vision and execution will change as it shifts from being a pure-play vendor to being a SAP acquisition. These changes may have consequences for its product lines, channels, support and contracts Challenging and expensive migration to XI. Difficulty with release configurations, implementation and support Limited integration between BO and Crystal product lines Unknown future support for non-SAP data sources Limited scalability with both Crystal and Web Intelligence No report design sharing between IT, business user and interactive end user roles Limited object reusability with Crystal Reports Must design data-cube Universe before creating any reports. Maintenance may cause high TCO, high time to market and low user adoption. No automated Excel spreadsheet generation or live charts Crystal Xcelcius lacks embedded macros, design blueprints, hyper-linking, server side generation of spreadsheets No object-orientation leads to lots of reports to maintain Limited ability to brand applications to a customers look and feel Limited server APIs and no report encyclopedia Single-threaded CORBA based server could lead to poor performance and limit scalability No active viewing features such as page-level security, demand paging or progressive viewing No open source product offering

Cognos
ReportNet (Cognos Query and Report Studios) is a highquality ad hoc query; analytics and reporting tool aimed at power users, and competes with Business Objects WebIntelligence. STRENGTHS Targeted performance management across broad decision makers with extended modeling and

administration capabilities
Good ad hoc reporting capabilities for power users Good solution for small, internal analysis projects Cognos acqusition by IBM should bolster Cognos data

integration capabitlities
Security at user, package and object level Excellent documentation and support

WEAKNESSES Limited layout and flexible reporting functionality as compared to other BI vendors Requires extensive training for busienss and users Weak published performance benchmarks No report design sharing between IT, power user, business user and interactive end user roles Gap in functionality between Report and Query studios Limited capabilities and functionality for IT developers No centralized metadata repository Mutiple interfaces decreases adoption and increases costs Limited caching resulting in too many hits on the database. Report generation bursts reports into too many hard to manage pages Requires a time consuming ETL process Server-generated spreadsheets have limited functionality Minimal output search, navigation and view capabilities High TCO due to hardware and user-based license costs No open source product offering

Microsoft Reporting Services

Microsoft-centric reporting technology aimed at Visual Studio .NET developers deploying reports to Windows users. Microsofts integration with its MS Office products is attractive to organizations standardized on Microsoft infrastructure STRENGTHS Economic pricing Large community of Microsoft application developers Basic reporting solution for Microsoft environments Deliver scheduled reports in PDF, Excel, HTML and email WEAKNESSES Still playing catch up with BI vendors. Lags behind pure-play vendors in terms of metadata managements, ad-hoc reporting, dashboarding and query capabilities

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 Does not integrate well in organizations that have

heterogeneous applications and information infrastructure Requires Windows, Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server Difficult to access multiple data sources in real time Report designer is more web-oriented than pageoriented, making it difficult to create picture-perfect reports Limited server scalability No page-level security or large-audience features No embedding of reports in applications, portals or dashboards Requires SQL Server 2005 access license for every user No open source strategy; head on J2EE competitor

Information Builders WebFocus

WebFocus is an integrated, web-based BI platform with strong data access and scalability but weak report-design functionality and very limited support for end users. STRENGTHS EDA middleware connects to wide variety of data sources. Creates, consumes and publishes Web Services Distribute reports via web, email, and mobile devices Report wizard and associated templates Powerful spreadsheet generation capabilities WEAKNESSES Very limited in ad-hoc reporting capabilities Extending apps requires proprietary, antique 4GL programming language called Focus Focus developers are expensive and hard to find Very limited support for print- and presentation-quality reports Complex reports require some level of programming Spreadsheet reports not fully functional; no spreadsheet designer GUI tool is limited in functionality and difficult to use Maintenance could require extensive changes to each report due to lack of object orientated development Customization, personalization and embedding difficult Report development restricted to IT and power users No on-demand paging; long waits to view long reports No open source product offering

MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy is similar to Actuate in terms of marketing an enterprise BI platform. They target the five types of BI, Scorecards & Dashboards, Enterprise Reporting, OLAP Analysis, Advanced and Predictive Analysis and Alerts and Notifications. STRENGTHS All five business intelligence types run off their unified architectural foundation and common metadata layer Powerful integration capabilities, very scalable relational OLAP architecture and object oriented metadata model Powerful flash dashboarding capability Best cube based slice-and-dice OLAP analysis, full investigative drilling through data warehouses and predictive analysis WEAKNESSES Focused mainly on BI with very little focus on CPM and data integration Time to deploy is large as data warehouse and cubes need to be created before reports can be designed and deployed. Data from multiple sources must be loaded into the data warehouse before it can be reported on Limited flexibility to adapt to changing environments and requirements No report design sharing between IT, power user, business user and interactive end user roles Limited scalability Maintenance of metadata later requires time and is expensive. This leads to high TCO. Limited support for casual users

JasperSoft
JasperReports and JasperServer provide open source reporting for workgroups and small businesses STRENGTHS Open source, pure Java reporting, for superior portability Support for barcodes, charting and paging Easy to configure and install WEAKNESSES Stand alone JAVA based IDE Not eclipse based Limited data access, supports only one data source per report Branding, customization and personalization difficult Limited documentation and help No error checking or debugging functionality No page-level security or large-audience features Difficult to generate templates outside the normal workflow

No live spreadsheets, only simple data dump to Excel No open source product offering

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Pentaho
Open source business intelligence project with applications in reporting, analysis, dashboarding, data mining, workflow and BI platform STRENGTHS Open source project with flexible deployment choices Flexible output formats Wizard driven report generation Completely open source BI stack WEAKNESSES Lack of a common unified platform. A combination of several un-integrated open source projects. Old fashioned banded report designer with limited data support No extensibility framework like in BIRT No data set filtering, mapping or conditional highlighting Very weak documentation High overhead of development, maintenance and extensibility Java application server needed for zero footprint and interactive web reports Limited support and indemnification No published benchmarks and scalability Future support for BIRT is unknown Lack of a collaborative reporting architecture

Custom Applications
When selecting a tool to build a web reporting solution, often customers opt to build their own solution using C++, Java or other web application development environments STRENGTHS User the expertise of in house application developers Build reporting applications to the exact specifications Branding and customization is easy WEAKNESSES Takes longer time to market as all functionality has to be built from the ground up Costs more than anticipated As the application becomes successful, scalability becomes an issue which may cause a re-write of the application Difficult to adapt changing requirements Maintenance and enhancement consumes resources Product doesnt grow with the market Advanced features and functionality have to be built Concurrent user access, security, integration all have to be built Report generation, presentation, storage and viewing functionality has to be built and supported Limited support for every user in the enterprise No page-level security or large-audience features Custom platform development detracts from the primary mission of the application

Disclaimer
Every attempt has been made to represent offerings accurately. While this document is opinion-based, it represents Actuates understanding of the functionality provided by each vendor. Given that product software evolves over time, the authors recognize that many of these assertions may be addressed in current and future versions of each vendors product.

For More Information

For more information on selecting the right reporting technology for your applications, contact Actuate today. www.actuate.com

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