A Need for More BI Speed

When it comes to business intelligence, there is no shortage of data in the enterprise. The issue is how to frequently get access to it, especially when it's stored in a wide variety of formats.

An interesting new approach to tackling this problem was presented this week by Actuate in the form of an X2BIRT offering that combines BIRT metadata server software for presenting data with a transaction engine that greatly speeds up the processing of the data.

Based on Enterprise Output Management software that Actuate picked up with the acquisition of Xenos, X2BIRT makes it more feasible to build BI applications that span a broad variety of data. In addition, N. Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing, notes that the transaction technology packaged inside X2BIRT also makes it easier to work with sources of Big Data that companies are increasingly finding valuable as they look to analyze business trends over extended periods of time.

The problem with a lot of the data in the enterprise is that in order to work with it effectively, IT organizations are spending a lot of time making copies of data and then distributing those data sets around the enterprise to various applications. Not only does all this data have to be reconciled and managed, it consumes a massive amount of IT infrastructure resources.

If IT organizations can find a way that allows users to work more effectively with data that still resides in the primary location it was originally created in, then the implications of X2BIRT go well beyond increasing the productivity of BI users because IT departments won't have to spend as much time on massaging the data as it moves between the original source and the BI application.

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