Actuate Integrates BI Platform with Amazon Redshift

Open source business intelligence (BI) platform provider Actuate (News - Alert) has integrated ActuateOne – the company’s BIRT-based suite of commercial products for development and deployment of custom business analytics applications – and BIRT onDemand – Actuate’s SaaS (News - Alert) version of ActuateOne – with Amazon Redshift, AWS’s new petabyte-scale cloud warehouse service.

ActuateOne, running with Amazon Redshift, allows organizations to visualize and analyze data of any volume or complexity from almost any source including Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert), print archives and machine log data. The integration heralds another addition to Actuate’s growing line of ActuateOne connectors for big data-ready data sources that allow developers, IT departments and OEMs to offer “world-class” BI applications, according to Jeff Morris, vice president of product marketing at Actuate.

“When integrated with Amazon Redshift, ActuateOne users are suddenly able to scale data at the same rate as ActuateOne scales users,” Morris said in a statement. “Amazon Redshift can improve query performance and deliver data faster to ActuateOne, where it can be intuitively displayed and reconfigured in seconds through drag and drop interfaces to show patterns and anomalies and generate insights that lead to meaningful business improvements.”

In addition, Amazon Redshift helps customers overcome one of the big issues in Big Data – where to put the data: “’If not in Hadoop, then where?’ With this integration, we enable data already in the cloud to remain there for ActuateOne visualization,” Morris added.

ActuateOne’s visualization and analysis features combined with Amazon Redshift’s performance, scalability and cost (under $1,000/terabyte/year) gives organizations of all sizes the benefits of “ultra-fast access and near-speed-of-thought visualization” for cloud-based business analytics on real-time big data workloads of any size or complexity, according to Terry Wise, head of worldwide ecosystem at AWS.

“With this integration, customers will benefit from Amazon Redshift’s performance, ease of use, scalability and low price, along with the rich analysis and visualization capabilities of Actuate’s solutions,” Wise said.

Company officials touted the following features and benefits of ActuateOne and BIRT onDemand using Amazon Redshift:

• Enhanced scalability for visualization and analysis of data in ActuateOne: Amazon Redshift enables customers to scale easily from a single 2TB node up to one hundred 16TB nodes for 1.6PB of compressed user data and ActuateOne makes this data easily available to customers for analysis and visualization.
• Data processing speed enables instant interactivity and “speed of thought” visualizations and insights within ActuateOne from extremely large data sets.
• Elimination of upfront data warehousing costs: Amazon Redshift requires no upfront payments and enables customers to pay as they go. Amazon Redshift costs less than $1,000 per TB per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.

ActuateOne can be deployed in either an on-premise environment or in private or public clouds – and supports Web-based and mobile BI on the Apple iPad and iPhone (News - Alert), as well as on Android phones and tablets.