Item: OpenText Magellan
Rating: 8
Author: Christopher Noyes

Overall Satisfaction with Actuate

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it to present reports to customers and to our executives for our rich media advertising business. Our entire business uses this as a reporting platform. We had internally developed reporting, that worked well, but was hard to support and extend and expensive to maintain. We also wanted to embed it in another application to include customer facing reporting in the platform they use.

Pros and Cons

Pros

In terms of extensibility this is the best reporting platform we have seen. You can build very sophisticated reports with different data sources, and extend the basic functionality with javscript code
Securing the BI system is also a strength and the system can be configured relatively easily.
Reports can be available on mobile devices
Good Javascript embedding framework does not require the site to be built in java

Cons

We have found a ton of bugs in there, our implementation is very complex and we use a lot of features, but we wish there were less bugs. Particularly with parameter display and validation.
Actuate has decided not to continue to support the birtondemand platform and it is running on older versions of their main platform.
Building out security extensibility is rather complex.
They have not had a rest interface until new versions of iHub.

Alternatives Considered

Jaspersoft,Pentaho,Microsoft BI

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

Likelihood to Renew

Pricing for BIRT onDemand is going up 10x and sales can't negotiate. They are not supporting this platform. For us, a smaller company using iHub is going to be too expensive. We can't continue to use this solution.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

Comments

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If you have the budget for it it can do great things, if you are a small company run, don't walk away.

Software Version

Modules Used