Actuate Announces Support for Hadoop

SOURCE:  Actuate

Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The people behind BIRT® and the leader in open source Business Intelligence (BI), today announced support and services for Hadoop and MapReduce. Organizations are increasingly turning to Hadoop for the storage of massive amounts of data and thus need scalable ways to explore, analyze and visualize the insights stored within it. The combination of BIRT’s open source, flexible approach to BI and Hadoop’s data scalability enables organizations to build information applications that give the full range of end users – including business analysts and non-technical users – valuable insight into data stored in Hadoop.

“It is clear that there is a need in the market for analysis and exploration of large scale data. Increasingly, organizations that manage large amounts of structured relational data also need to process large amounts of semistructured data such as the type found in web logs and application logs,” said David Menninger, VP & Research Director, Ventana Research. “Eclipse BIRT 3.7 addresses this need with its toolset for connecting to Hadoop enabling organizations to analyze and explore this source of unstructured and semi structured data.”

Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL). Not only can BIRT provide native access to Hadoop as a data source for analysis, dashboards, reporting and custom BI and information applications, it can be used to build data sets or data visualizations that seamlessly combine Hadoop data with other data sources including SQL databases, XML data, document archives and flat files.

Hadoop is an open source framework for managing vast amounts of distributed data that works in conjunction with MapReduce, a framework to support distributed computing for large data sets on hardware clusters. Because of the open standards that BIRT adheres to as part of its charter as the top level BI and reporting project within the Eclipse Foundation, it is able to leverage pre-built MapReduce functions and rules, enabling developers to quickly get started on building applications to explore their Hadoop data.

Hadoop readily accommodates change because it stores raw data in any format, and therefore does not require complex data and schema mappings that are time-consuming to set up and difficult to maintain.  In turn, BIRT enables developers to build BI applications on top of Hadoop that are equally flexible yet allow organizations to operationalize the use of Hadoop for decision support, monitoring, batch reporting and analysis. Applications build using BIRT and Hadoop enable end users to:

• Visualize Hadoop data in any format including dashboards, spreadsheets, PDF documents and on mobile devices
• Drill from summary to detailed data in Hadoop
• Join data from Hadoop and other data sources within the same report or dashboard
• Analyze trends and find key insights in Hadoop data.

“Actuate is in the unique position of understanding the needs of enterprises looking to explore Big Data and catering to the sophistication and flexibility required by developers looking to leverage Hadoop to build the Business Intelligence applications of the future,” said Pete Cittadini, CEO and president at Actuate Corporation. “We are excited to be more involved in the Hadoop movement and believe that BIRT 3.7 and Actuate’s expertise are critical in applying Business Intelligence to data that organizations generate both internally and externally.”

Eclipse BIRT 3.7
Eclipse BIRT 3.7 is available immediately.  The latest version includes Hive/Hadoop support as well as emitters for Open Office.  For a full list of what’s new in BIRT 3.7 visit: http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/devshare/designing-birt-reports/1378-birt-3.7-released/. To download Eclipse BIRT 3.7 visit: http://www.birt-exchange.com/be/downloads/resources/?articleid=17932.

Getting Started with Hadoop and BIRT
Leverage Actuate’s Professional Services organization to integrate BI with Big Data by getting the most out of Hive/Hadoop distributed systems with BIRT. Organizations can jumpstart their Hive/Hadoop BI initiative with a brief engagement that will introduce them to the unique integration capabilities provided in BIRT 3.7.
To learn more, contact Actuate Professional Services at 1-877-228-8802 (US & Canada) or contact us by email at ps@actuate.com.

Actuate – the people behind BIRT

Actuate founded and co-leads the Eclipse BIRT open source project. ActuateOne is a unified suite of products for rapidly developing and deploying BIRT-based custom Business Intelligence applications and information applications. Applications built with ActuateOne provide one user experience regardless of task or skill level; are supported by one server for any deployment including cloud and are built with one BIRT design that can access and integrate any data source – including high volume print streams. ActuateOne adds rich data visualizations, including interactivity, dashboards, analytics, and deployment options to web and mobile BIRT applications, helping organizations drive revenue through higher customer satisfaction and improved operational performance.

Actuate has over 4,700 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993, Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.actuate.com or visit the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.