Comparex Africa Customer Oriented Applications (COA) has announced the local availability of Actuate 6 Information Delivery platform, the next generation of Actuate`s Internet-based flagship enterprise reporting platform.
The new version focuses on personalised, self-service information delivery and manipulation for information consumers - including customers, prospects partners and employees - across the enterprise and beyond.
Actuate 6 is based on a Web services architecture that exposes the software to .NET and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) components, through an extensive set of SOAP (simple object access protocol)-based APIs (application programming interfaces).
Actuate 6 offers a host of upgraded and new features that will appeal to information consumer end-users and IT departments.
"For years, companies have used traditional business intelligence tools to access and analyse information," says Rodney Hood, managing executive at Comparex Africa COA. "However, these tools have been used by only the power users. With the introduction of Web-based information systems, business intelligence systems have been superseded by information delivery solutions that serve the needs of the entire extended enterprise.
"The newly architected server in Actuate 6 delivers high scalability, high availability and high performance, broadening the market to include systems that directly increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction and retention."
Actuate 6 integrates easily into .NET and J2EE environments, and with Web, portal and end-user computing initiatives. Companies now have the choice of named-user pricing or CPU-based pricing, making Actuate 6 the most cost-effective solution for information delivery projects.
"The market is shifting to a focus on serving the needs of a broader audience of information consumers in addition to internal analysts," says Dan Vesset, senior analyst with IDC. "Actuate, with its strength in information delivery to the enterprise and beyond, is poised to be a logical beneficiary of this evolution."
For information consumers, Actuate 6 provides:
* Full-function Excel spreadsheet reporting, including a new wizard-based development environment for creating full-function Excel spreadsheets that run in Web browsers;
* A distributed "encyclopaedia" that enables individual groups to manage their own information needs, enhanced integration with applications, data sources, enterprise portals; and
* Internationalisation services, such as Unicode support and multilingual report formatting. As infrastructure software, information delivery platforms must be secure, available 24x7 with no exceptions and scale to reach millions of information consumers, anywhere in the world.
In addition, information delivery solutions must integrate seamlessly with existing technologies, mirror a company`s brand image and provide actionable information in a familiar form that requires no training.
Actuate 6 can access and deliver vital business information from applications and data sources throughout the business, adding value to transactional databases, customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), human resources, financial management and manufacturing systems, among others, across many industries.
For IT, Actuate adds a variety of features that include:
* For Web services via compliance with SQL, SOAP, XML and other industry-standard Web, data access and integration protocols;
* A set of portal services - such as "Reportlets", dynamic page sizing and an open display converter framework - that ease integration with enterprise portals; and
* Load balancing for greater scalability and fault tolerance, via automatic failover and clustering across heterogeneous operating systems, hot backup capabilities, and live maintenance for easy server administration.
Actuate 6 has been in advanced beta testing with companies such as British Telecom and Deutsche Bank.
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