May 11, 1999, Volume 2 - Number 7
Michael Carnell
Reporting to the Masses
Actuate extends its reporting system to the Internet and keeps its customers well informed
The reporting tool market is an increasingly difficult market to approach these days. The days of simple, column-style reports are gone. Graphs, graphics, drill-downs, and rollups are the tools of today. Actuate Software Corp. has stepped in to try to provide for the reporting community’s needs.
Actuate’s products include a reporting server, development and administrative workstation, Web reporting agent, standalone reporting agent, and customizable end-user reporting desktop. Starting with the Actuate Report Server, these products stand in front of an existing database infrastructure to provide a complete reporting solution.
Jim Murdy is MIS project manager for Xilinx, a San Jose, Calif.-based international producer of field-programmable processor chips. Xilinx uses the Actuate Report Server to extract information from Clarify Inc.’s ClearQuality customer support product, which uses an Oracle database running on a Unix platform. Using standalone as well as Web-based viewers, Murdy has deployed approximately 50 reports throughout the organization in less than two years with three people devoted to the project. Murdy says that one of the reasons the project has gone so well was that Actuate provided excellent installation and consulting services.
Murdy states that, although you can produce useful results quickly, the product’s capabilities can take a long time to master: “Although I had experience with GUI development environments before, I wished I had spent more time evaluating the object-oriented development methodologies of the product. That would have saved even more effort along the way.”
Asked to compare the Actuate product to a competitor such as Seagate Software’s Crystal Reports, Murdy’s first thought was about the product’s depth and robustness of development. “I think a product like Crystal is fine for third-party products that need to include an end-user report writer, but for the complex reporting that full-time report writers must do, I just don’t think it stands up.”
Another Actuate Reporting System user is Clean Harbors, an environmental management service based in Braintree, Mass. Clean Harbors has more than a hundred clients, many in the Fortune 500, who access reports and data through the Web using the Actuate system. The company’s sales force is also using the Web access, eliminating the need for traditional dial-in lines to retrieve reports. “It was the Web component that was probably the biggest selling point,” says Bob Romano, webmaster for Clean Harbors. Another major feature that was a selling point for Romano was the connectivity. “We have multiple Sybase servers on VMS and Unix as well as Oracle and offline ODBC-type systems. We had to have a product that could pull all of that together.”
“The hardest part for Clean Harbors,” Romano says, “is supporting all the external users. The deployments inside the company are easy. We can maintain those and set the standards for the browser that will be used, the version that will be used, and that type of thing. But you can’t do that for an Internet deployment. Every person who pulls our data from the Internet has a slightly different system. That is both a benefit, because people can use whatever equipment they have, and a detriment, because we have to figure out how to support it.”
Another plus for Romano’s use of Actuate at Clear Harbors is the fact that PeopleSoft has just adopted the product for use with their personnel system. “We couldn’t be happier,” says Romano. “Though Crystal Reports, which PeopleSoft had been using, was acceptable, it just didn’t have the power or configurability we really needed.”
The only problems that were expressed across the board were support, which seems to be getting better, and the need to be able to control what the users produce, in terms of size or number of rows, from an administrative standpoint. When a user unknowingly creates something that is too large for the system to handle, it takes the administrator’s intervention to correct the problem. Jim Murdy says the only time he has ever been called at home about a problem with Actuate was when a user tried to create a report with more than 70,000 pages. “Other than that,” he says, “the best compliment I can give the product is that I never have to think about it. It just runs.”
As for support, users say it was lacking early on, but is improving. “If there’s one thing I’ll say about the support folks now,” remarks Murdy, “they are tenacious. If you have called in an issue and aren’t following up, they’ll track you down. I’ve never had a vendor do that!” Bob Romano says that the support for his developers is great. “But,” he adds, “some further documentation on the administrative server would be really helpful. It runs fine, but sometimes you have no idea what it’s doing.”
Overall, the users of Actuate seem quite pleased with the product and what it lets them do. Information needs are constantly changing, but Actuate’s users have found that the company listens to their needs and keeps advancements coming. That is probably why the current users are staying loyal, and new users such as PeopleSoft are adopting the product daily.
Michael Carnell is a systems engineer at CareAlliance Health Services in Charleston, S.C. You can reach him via email at carnellm@palmettobug.com.
