According to Actuate officials, Information Object Designer is aimed squarely at BI application developers and significantly reduces time spent in developing re-usable views of data (called information objects) by using a friendlier graphical user interface.
Technically, information objects provide a consistent metadata layer that Actuate 8 BI applications tap to source data from data warehouses and transactional systems. The objects are accessed via Actuate Query allowing report developers or Actuate e.Spreadsheet developers to build complex queries for generating printed, analytic or parameterized reports and dashboard displays. The objects inherit native security schemes (down to column and row level) and are Unicode compliant.
There’s tremendous benefit in going against a common metadata layer, said Mike Thoma vice president of product marketing at Actuate.
Getting the data ready burns up to 70% of the calories of the BI applications development cycle.
Using an intermediary information objects layer dramatically eases the ability to combine summary data warehouse data with more detailed, up-to-date information from operational data stores and planning sources, which Mr Thoma says is a common scenario in BI applications development.
The ability to access data outside the firewall is a key benefit for applications used by customers and partners, Mr Thoma said.
Mr Thoma acknowledges that the initial release of Information Objects Designer is aimed at developers that have a firm understanding of corporate data sources. But he envisages that as more reusable components get built there will be an opportunity for deployment across a much broader range of users that have limited development skills.
As we end up with more and more reusable components these can be expanded down to the business user level, he said.
Mr Thoma added that Information Objects Designer also provides a quicker way to build enterprise information integration (EII) – data federation – capabilities into Actuate 8.
Before this was done in a programmatic way [using technology acquired from Nimble Technology Inc back in 2003]. Now users have a GUI to pull all the sources together quickly…they can construct information objects that can be made up of other information objects to provide an additional EII capability.
Information Object Designer is Actuate’s first commercial tool to come out of the Eclipse open source foundation. The company is also spearheading the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) Eclipse project. Mr Thoma said the involvement of the Eclipse community radically reduced the time to develop the tool. The time [to market] savings have been enormous.
Information Object Designer is part of the service pack bundled into Actuate 8. Pricing starts at $495.
