Actuate, MicroStrategy Beef Up the BI Quotient

Actuate and MicroStrategy want to expand BI's potential for business.

Expanded platform support and analytical and data manipulation capabilities are in the offing for enterprises looking to expand their use of business intelligence technologies.

New products on the way from Actuate Corp. and MicroStrategy Inc. are designed to help businesses grapple with new challenges, such as getting a better handle on business activity and performance and running mixed server operating system environments.

Actuate this week will announce Actuate 8, which bundles enterprise information integration technology that Actuate acquired from Nimble Technology Inc. last July with the Actuate applications core enterprise reporting technology. The combination is designed to give users integrated analysis of data from multiple sources, including operational systems and data warehouses.

Customers will be able to track data changes faster than with traditional reporting systems, according to Actuate officials in South San Francisco, Calif.

Actuate 8 also supports shared metadata among the applications in the suite and supports functions in Microsoft Corp.s Excel, such as pivot tables, data filters and three-dimensional charts, in the Actuate e.Spreadsheet application. In addition, this release supports adoption monitoring, so administrators can keep track of how many users are actually using the applications.

Can Microsofts BI tools compete with the big boys? Click here for eWEEK.com Associate Editor Lisa Vaas view. Separately, MicroStrategy is attempting to extend use of its BI technology by expanding platform support in its namesake 7i Universal Edition platform, which is due this week. The upgrade extends the Vienna, Va., companys BI platform for enterprise reporting, cube analysis, ad hoc query and analysis, statistical analysis, and report delivery and alerting to 64-bit AIX and Solaris environments. New features, service packs and patches will be released across Unix and Windows product lines simultaneously, officials said.

Telecommunications company MCI Inc. is upgrading its MicroStrategy environment for performance reasons, said Damon Dworak, manager of decision support services for MCI. "Using MicroStrategy 7i Universal Editions next-generation architecture has removed [memory] limits and will allow us to guarantee high performance to our user community," said Dworak, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

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