Actuate Moves to Make Predictive Analytics More Accessible

Long known for providing tools that make it easier to visualize data, Actuate today moved up in weight class in the predictive analytics space with the release of BIRT Analytics.

Based on columnar database technology that Actuate gained with the acquisition of Quiterian S.L. last year, Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing for Actuate, says BIRT Analytics is designed to make Big Data analytics accessible to a broad number of end users without necessarily requiring the assistance of a data scientist.

Akiha says what distinguishes BIRT Analytics is that it gives end users a self-service capability that allows them to easily examine massive amounts of data on an ad-hoc basis. That’s critical, adds Akiha, because most organizations don’t have the technical skills or access to the data scientists needed to create predictive analytics applications using other platforms.

BIRT Analytics can be used to not only create reports in any number of formats, but also connect to external data sources such as social media feeds. The basic idea, says Akiha, is to make it possible for end users to analyze multiple sources of data without requiring a small army of developers to create custom applications using platforms such as Hadoop.

With more Big Data applications moving into production environments on a daily basis, interest in predictive analytics applications is on the rise. The challenge facing IT organizations is to make all that data available to the largest number of end users possible in a way that doesn’t consume massive amounts of limited IT time and resources.